Link building, done correctly and without causing the search engines to think you’re doing something wrong, can turn the right anchor text into SERP ranking gold.
Murdok has been covering the Shop.org Summit, taking place in Las Vegas. You can catch our conference interviews at Murdok videos right now.
Work, work, work. That’s the message from Todd Friesen at Range Online Media. Nothing else will substitute for the work needed to build links.
Anchor text attracts spiders on the Internet just as juicy flies pull in arachnids for a sticky web-based feast. To find out what’s going to attract the desired audience, Friesen said people need to know what their competitors have been doing in the same space.
That competitive research is at your fingertips. A visit to Google to look for link:www.somesite.com, or to MSN or Yahoo’s Site Explorer to seek out linkdomain:somesite.com -site:somesite.com, can help.
Even better, Friesen highlighted a couple of useful tools for link research. One works on the Web, the other as a desktop download.
TouchGraph features a browser-based tool written in Java that can show the relationships between sites as seen by Google. TouchGraph can look for relationships based on keywords or URLs.
Greg Boser has a tool called Tattler available, for pulling links from Yahoo’s Site Explorer into a format suited for an Excel spreadsheet (hint: the good info is available by right-clicking a URL in the spreadsheet.)
Once you know how others have brought in links, you’ll have a better idea of what you need to do to help make your site more prominent in the search results.
Murdok anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this story.
