Inbound links & SEO

Importance of Inbound Links in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Inbound links are the links which are pointing to your webpage/website from any other source apart from your own website. Inbound links are an important source of increasing your Search Engine Rankings. If you wish to appear in top search engine results for your category, you need to give emphasis on the quality and nature of inbound links. In a nutshell, the effect of 1 quality inbound link is far better than 10 irrelevant inbound links to your website, so you need to be extra careful regarding the quality of inbound links to your website.

There are certain points which you can keep in mind while designing a campaign for generating inbound links to your webpage/ website.

• Relevance: The source of inbound link should be relevant to the category of your website/webpage. For example, if you have a website selling electronic gadgets, then its good to have inbound links from the directories displaying latest gadgets rather than having a directory listing road construction contractors of your town.

• Effective use of anchor text in inbound link: The anchor text should be used effectively to include the keyword which your webs page is focusing. This will enhance the relevance of your web page for the keyword you are targeting, and hence the Search engine rankings will be high.

• Page Selection: Carefully select pages and use them as landing pages for various inbound links. Make sure that you use proper distribution and target right kind of page in order boost your search engine rankings.

• Links from .ORG, .EDU, .Gov, etc carries special weight age. Try to get more links from these websites and you will see improved search engine rankings for your website.

• Constant periodic review: Over a period, review the quality of inbound links, the anchor text, and the landing pages for inbound links. This will help you in fine-tuning and getting improved results over time.

• Avoid inbound links from NO-Follow instructions home page. No follow instructions are given by web pages, not to follow a particular links to the search engine crawlers. For example, wikepedia.org is an open encyclopedia project where anyone can post/edit/delete articles along with web links. The links provided there have No follow instructions thus there is no importance given to the links posted there by anyone.

Design and work on a systematic approach for inbound link creation campaign and you can see tangible result in medium and long term in term of enhanced sales/ leads and conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Anchor Text and SEO

Importance of Anchor Text in SEO

What is an Anchor Text?

An Anchor text is the text which is the visible pat of a hyperlink. For example, "SEO services Bangalore". The hyperlink is pointing towards http://www.himshilp.com/ but the text is “SEO services Bangalore”. This text is known as anchor text.

Anchor Text is used to describe the summary of the target page. In above example, the page http://www.himshilp.com/ gives details about the SEO Services and various other services provided by the firm Himshilp which is a Bangalore based firm, so the anchor text “SEO Services Bangalore” is justified.

Anchor Text gives an idea to the visitor of a particular page that what is in store for him if he clicks a particular link on that and move to another page. Thus anchor text indicates the nature and type of content on the target page. This increases the importance of the page and enhances the relevance of the target page.

A brief on the importance of the Anchor Text

• Use of keywords in the anchor text increases the possibility of target page getting higher position in search engine rankings. Reason: Anchor Text increases the relevance of the target page.
  
• Anchor Text is liked by the search engines as they can give weight age to the target page based on the text used in the anchor text.
  
• A good interlinking of pages within a website using Anchor Text increases the changes of the website in attaining high search engine rankings.
  
• While doing link building, ensure that the Anchor Text you are using are relevant to the target pages of your website. Use keywords intelligently to increase relevance and weight age of your website pages.

To sum up, you must use Anchor Text Optimization as a part of your SEO strategy effectively. Search engines love them so you must use Anchor Text to benefit your website.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

Internal Linking and SEO

How does Internal Linking Helps?

The links coming to your website from outside that is other websites matters a lot. The inbound links help the website and the page in terms of increased weight age for PR calculation. The links received from any external website / source is one part of the overall linking program of your website.

What about the internal links within the website? This is a very important technique for SEO which is ignored by many websites. The more internal linking you have, more suitable your website is for crawling. In fact some improvement in the internal linking, navigation can improve your visibility in search results drastically.
There are few factors which are required for improving internal linking of a website

• Easy to understand sitemap: En easy to understand sitemap can be a well beginning. It is an important element of any good website. It serves two purposes, firstly it can give crawlers a good starting point to crawl all the pages on a website and secondly it can give visitors also a place to start looking for the information they need.
  Tip: While setting up a sitemap, use your internal directory structure to group the links within a heading. This gives a neat, uncluttered site map.

• Footer Links: Footer links are placed at the bottom of the page. This also services two purposes, first it helps the crawlers to crawl the entire site and second it helps the visitors to jump to other page in case the page is very long. They need not to go back to the top of the page to navigate to other pages. I short; it facilitates movement of crawlers and visitors within the website.

• Using Menus: Menus are the best possible tools for navigation. They guide the visitors to the various pages and sections of the website. Similarly the crawlers also follow menus and move around the website. This is the one of the way to facilitate the deep crawling of a website. For this purpose, the menus should be in a readable format for crawlers. Avoid having FLASH menu items as it can confuse the crawlers. Though they can read if but why to make it complex for them. Feed crawlers with easy to understand HTML menus so that they can do their job effortlessly, this is what an objective of SEO is, isn’t it?

Use a judicious mix of the keywords while strengthening the internal linking structure. A good structure helps crawlers to crawl properly and better search engine rankings and it helps visitors too to find the relevant page of your website thus improving sales conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp