Why does the link structure of your website has an effect on your rankings?

The internal link structure of your site allows you to spread the link power of your home page to the individual pages of your site.

For example, if 1000 other websites link to your home page, then your home page has a certain link power that can be spread to the other pages of your site. If you link to 50 pages on your home page then each page will get 1/50 of the link power. If you link to only 10 pages, then each page will get much more link power passed to it (1/10).

The more link power a page receives, the more likely it is that the page will get high rankings on search engines. Your internal link structure allows you to direct search engines to your most important pages.

There are several things that you can do to improve the rankings of special pages on your website:

1. Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines.
2. Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page. The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.
3. Use your targeted keywords in the links to these pages. Make sure that you use keywords that are highly relevant and targetedShow search engines for which keywords your web pages are relevant.
4. Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to somepage.htm but to www.site.com/somepage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you’ll get backlinks from these sites.
5. Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn’t be listed in search engines.The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site. If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages.
6. Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. This is very similar to tip 5. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages they can take a close look at the pages for which you want to be ranked.
7. Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages. You might want to use the link checker that you can access in the new IBP.

It’s important that you get the right kind of links. If you have 20 good incoming links then you’ll get better rankings than with 100 bad incoming links.

So what makes a good incoming link? There are several points that can make a link better than other links:

1. The link should use the keyword in the anchor text

If you want to get high rankings for a search term like “buy brown shoes” then the links to your website should use exactly that text. The text that is used to link to your site (the “anchor text”) influences the words for which your website will get high rankings.

Make sure that the texts that are used to link to your website contain words for which you want to get high rankings on search engines.

2. The link should be from a relevant page

Links from related web pages usually work better than links from unrelated pages. Links from unrelated pages won’t hurt your rankings but Google likes links from websites that are related to yours better.

3. The link should go to a relevant page on your site

While it’s okay to get links to your home page it is better to get links to the page that is most relevant to the chosen anchor text. If the link text is “buy brown shoes” then you should make sure that the link goes to a page that deals with brown shoes.

If the link text matches the content of the linked pages then it’s more likely that your web page is really relevant to that term and it’s more likely that you’ll get high rankings for that search term.

In addition, you increase the user experience. If a surfer clicks on a “buy brown shoes” link it’s much more likely that he’ll buy on your site if he gets the correct page.

4. It’s good if the link is from an authority site

Links from pages with high authority will help to increase the TrustRank of your website. Links from websites with high PageRank have a positive effect on the rankings of your own site.

Unfortunately, the Google PageRank that is displayed in the green bar in Google’s toolbar is not the PageRank that Google uses for its ranking algorithm. The PageRank displayed in the toolbar is outdated, often wrong and more a gimmick than a real help. You’ll often find websites with low PageRank that rank higher than pages with high PageRank in the search results.

Don’t trust the green pixels and use common sense. If a website is well known and if the site has good search engine rankings then it’s likely that it is also an authority website.

5. The link must not have a nofollow attribute

The nofollow attribute tells search engines that they should not follow a link. Links with that attribute don’t help your search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, you have to check the HTML code of your link partners to find out if they use a nofollow attribute to link to your site.

If you don’t want to check the HTML code of each website manually, you can use the link check command in IBP & ARELIS to quickly check if your link partners use a nofollow attribute to link to your site.

Further information on how to get high quality links can be found in our free link building eBook. If you build links to your website as explained in the eBook, your website will get the best possible rankings on Google and other search engines.

Crucial factors of link building:
(1) Quality and relevancy of link partners.
(2) SEO nature of link exchange directory and its pages.
(3) Expenses on link building and link management.
(4) Link exchange conversions.

Let’s make a step by step testdrive for Auto Link Exchanger over these points so that you could apply the same strategy for estimating other link building solutions.

(1) Quality and relevancy of link partners.

No doubts. The quality of links is a huge advantage. Search engines will not penalize a site for having backlinks on bad sites as you physically cannot control all sites that link to you. But if you are reciprocating to these sites and these sites don’t have relation to your niche or don’t have much trust – your link building can become a big trouble.

When Google is estimating the page to which you are reciprocating, their bots take into account (a) page rank of that page, (b) trust rank of the site, (c) relevancy. Auto Link Exchanger applies the same principles as its searching algorithm finds relevant sites and places link on pages that are nicely indexed and properly represent their niche. You can even choose Auto Link Exchanger’s setting to pick sites that are higher than PR 2 or 3 or 5 – up to you.

(2) SEO nature of link exchange directory and its pages.

The old days when links could be piled on category pages are over. Search engines will not penalize you for it. But those who use the latest SEO fashion to create link directory pages get solid advantage over those who create old style SEO-weak directories.

Close to a must today is having keywords in category titles, descriptions, URLs, in the content on the pages. Plus it is also crucial to blend relevant content with links right on the pages. Pages should have RSS feeds.

Auto Link Exchanger automated all these factors. With a number of settings made the tool is automatically creating SEO-wise pages, updates RSS feeds to search engines, delivers relevant news on pages and blends them with links. Also gives extra visibility to links by automatically showing PR picture and Alexa Rank close to each site.

(3) Expenses on link building and link management.

Link exchange is expensive: find links, exchange them, create link directory, control the links on other sites – this can turn into a big monthly budget on SEO team. You can cut down these expenses if you do all these jobs yourself, but you must be prepared to spend most of your daily time on this job.

Auto Link Exchanger automates most of the link building processes that include: building link directory, integrating necessary SEO elements into it, finding link partners, managing link exchange, controlling the backlinks. The only aspect that site owner should do with Auto Link Exchanger is installing the script and making its settings.

(4) Link exchange conversions.

Link exchange conversions are one of the biggest despairs of link building. Old-fashioned procedure of sending beggy email and waiting when someone will build links with your site gives very low conversions. Even if you make your emails customized it gives around 10% of clicks on these emails, and only part of opened emails will give you link exchanges. This results in very low percentage of successful link exchange conversions.

Auto Link Exchanger uses revolutionary principle of finding link partners that gives 50-60% link exchange conversions. And this is without sending beggy emails. The tool is shortcutting you directly to the pages and your links get on them – webmasters just need to approve which happens within first 15 minutes – up to several days. In some niches 80% conversions were reached with Auto Link Exchanger’s link building.

Using the same factors you can scale the value of other link building solutions on the market.

And if you want to test advantages of Auto Link Exchanger in action, you can get a free copy of this tool here:
http://www.autolinkexchanger.com