Don’t miss ranking opportunities for keywords by optimising existing inbound links
Posted by Frank Rui Jiang | Posted in SEO Tips | Posted on 28-10-2009
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Do you know you may miss some SEO opportunities to rank well for your targeting keyword because of wrong anchor text or even missing anchor text in existing inbound links?
People talk link building strategy every day, it’s an endless task to acquire inbound links, no matter it’s link baiting (bascially it costs a lot of time to create something useful), or social network profiles establishing (not very useful, especially if you don’t have time to get involved), or directories (you are more likely to pay for the good ones), or buying links (money + risk) or any other form of link building. Yes, it’s the most difficult part in SEO, and it’s unavoidable for most of the websites who want to rank better.
However, there are some companies who have good reputations, old websites with a bunch of quality inbound links already, and they are yet to know the great benefits of SEO link building implementations. One of my clients are amongst the companies I described above, they are very cautious of executing any SEO off-page optimisation and social network involvement due to the risk of damaging the reputation of their business. It’s understandable especially they are in the traditional industry, they haven’t got great knowledge about internet and if there is anything goes wrong, the impact would be disastrous. However, they still want to rank better for their keywords…
Due to restricted policy, I could not use my client as a perfect case study. The situation for them is, pretty much done all the SEO on-page optimasation, old domain with high authority, quite a few quality inbound links, and they are yet to decide to start link building or not, even though I proposed so many times with different ways to approach. So I tried proposed not to acquire new inbound links, but to optimise existing inbound links.
Here I randomly picked www.next.co.uk as an example (assume it does not want any further link building), and show step-by-step how I come up with this existing inbound links optimisation strategy.
1. Choose the targeting keywords and check the ranking in Google, let’s choose keyword “online shopping” as it is a pretty popular keyword. According to wordtracker, it has 7,125 similar searches and 2,235 exact match searches. Then check its google ranking via google.co.uk and it’s on the 8th position so far, pretty good but not good enough. Most of people click on top 3 search results, so it would bring a lot of customers if www.next.co.uk can go up to top 3.
2. Analyse inbound links using SEOmoz Backlink Analysis Tool, I am using the backlink analysis tool in SEOmoz lab. There is slightly difference between them, the backlink tool in SEOmoz lab has less comprehensive data, but easier for overviewing all the inbound links. However, it is limited to display up to 3000 most important inbound links, so I checked the total inbound links again using Linkscape, it has 7,429 backlinks including internal links.
Have you noticed the big blank there? Which has occured 120 times! Image if you can have these links with anchor text “online shopping”, wouldn’t be that really great to boost the ranking position? Especially next.co.uk only has around 60 inbound links with anchor text including “online shopping”, and it’s already been ranking for 8th position!
3. Approach to webmasters and convince them to add anchor text to these links. You may say, it’s really hard to convince webmasters to change anchor text because that was how they wanted them to be, yes, that’s right, but still do-able. However, for inbound links without an anchor text, that’s completely another story. Most of time, it happened because the websites use banners to link to next.co.uk, all they have to do, is to add an alt tag.
Let’s take a close look to these links, I picked 3 most important inbound links (from other domains) to next.co.uk without anchor texts.
http://www.s186600480.websitehome.co.uk/race/Links.htm
4. What are you waiting now? Go check your inbound links to see if there is any missing anchor texts – i.e. missing opportunities. Then send an E-mail to ask them politely to add alt tag.
If you have any other inbound link optimising strategy (if client does not want link building), please share it here, I would love to hear your opinion.
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