Modern SEO: Creating Links in a Panda World

Link building is one of, if not the top SEO strategy most webmasters use to grow their SEO value across the web. If you’ve been working in internet marketing for years, you’ve probably built thousands of inbound links to your website over the years – and likely feel like you have a proven system that works for building your SEO.

What you might not realize is how much the recent changes to Google’s algorithms (i.e. Penguin and Panda) have drastically changed the perception and value of inbound links across the web. In this article, you’ll get some concrete tips on how to address a few of the largest evolutionary changes Google has enacted on the value of links. Take a look, you just might notice a shocking disparate in your current methods and the new best practices that typify quality link building in a modern world of SEO.

Revised Anchor Text Architecture :

Okay, you probably already know anchor text basics – like having your targeted SEO terms you want to rank for as the primary anchor text of your links across the web. What you might not know however is that updates to the Google algorithm may actually penalize you for having too many links with the same anchor text across the web. A new best practice for inbound link anchor text is a widely varied amount of phrases, including long-tail phrases in proximity to brand terms Tagline For Digital Marketing.

For example, in the past, you might build 30 links per month to your printing website with the anchor Text Business Cards. While this might actually hurt your SEO value in today’s world of SEO, you can easily offset this with varied long-tail phrases like How to Get More Traffic for Your WordPress Blog, or Best way get more traffic for your WordPress blog. If you can get a wide array of links like this across the web at a constant steady rate, you’re going to see a noticeable increase in your SEO rankings vs. the ancient “standard” method of anchor text link building.

Website Relevancy: more than just PR :

In a traditional world of SEO, you could almost assume that a page with a decent Google Page Rank (PR) linking to your site, would provide you with quality SEO value. To this day, this isn’t completely untrue, but Panda has taken a significant bite out of the value that irrelevant website links can give your website. While it may be hard to argue that these links are actually hurting your SEO rankings, the larger risk in procuring and building irrelevant links is the amount of time you can waste creating links that are simply ignored by Google – due to their lack of relevancy. So what does it mean to have valid “relevancy” in a site that links to you?

While there can be some relevancy in simply having like industries among lining sites (like a boating blog, and a diving website), the absolute best key indicators that you can give Google about the relevancy of your site are the keywords that are found among both sites. Even better are title tags and page headers that contain the same keywords that you have on your site – and more specifically the landing page of the inbound link you’ve built. The more consistency there is among these websites, linked pages – the greater the value is going to be. Once you’ve optimized your links for this simple factor, and narrowed down your opportunity pool to these sites – then you can start looking at PR as the next defining factor for creating links.

Content Proximity: it makes a difference :

We already covered a bit about the relevancy of onsite content on both the linking and landing pages when creating and building links. However, in the new world of Google Panda – it’s essential not only to consider the keywords across a linking site/page – but in direct proximity to the live link and anchor text.

This means that you are going to get infinitely more value if you create a link that has industry and brand keywords directly surrounding the link – than a simple link on a relevant page, if it’s located in the page footer or elsewhere without any relevant keyword text surrounding it.

Some ideal methods for ensuring that you can get links with lots of relevant content proximity are to practice link-building tactics like guest posting, where if approved, you are in direct control of the keyword content that surrounds your link. Even if you aren’t getting a link from a guest post, you can still benefit from optimized link placement with the types of onsite content you create on your site.

Onsite blog posts/articles pertaining to tutorials and other usable industry content will have the best likelihood of attracting natural links that live within relevant page copy of other relevant industry sites.

Your SEO Mindset: your greatest asset :

The absolute best thing you can do to remedy the rapid changes we’ve seen in the world of SEO since Google Panda is to change your own subconscious mindset on SEO strategies like link building. As you begin to move your lens for link opportunities from that of simple factors like a number of links and PR, to factors like relevancy and content proximity – you’ll begin to see that your strategy will change as well. As you see a major shift in your strategy, you’ll also notice a shift in the SEO results you’ve been working for. Isn’t this what we’re all working for?