SEO Consultant In Auckland - Pt 4 - Back-Links - The Most Important Part

There are two stages to Google rankings - on-page and off-page. The on-page is the tags and titles we covered in Part 3. insert link.

The off-page accounts for close to 80% so it's vital to get it right but what exactly is it and how do you go about doing it?

This is all about links to your site from other sites to your site. They are important because Google regards inbound links as votes or ticks in favour of your site. If another site thinks it's worth linking to you, then Google assumes that your site must be important too for that term that links to you.

Read that last line again. It's the difference between a successful linking strategy which will get you to the top of Google and the usual haphazard linking that 97% of sites have and is the reason sites don't rank very well. More on that later.

There are four stages to off-page optimisation.

The first is assessing the quality of your on-line competition i.e. those site that rank on Page 1 for each of your target keywords.

You need to find out how many links they have coming into their different pages. This gives you an idea of how much work you have to do to get more links than them. Most people have links to their Home page which isn't the smartest thing to do. You want more than your Home page to rank well. Your main product or service for example.

So you need links to other pages - deep-linking as it's called.

Hmmm - how do you find out how many links your competition has? There are some tools you can download, learn out how to work them and then understand what it all means. It sounds complicated but actually, that part isn't too difficult.

In fact Yahoo has a link-checking service. Yahoo Link Count
which will show you the links Yahoo recognises to your site. (In this situation, Yahoo is better than Google who hide many of the links from public view although they know they are there).

But it doesn't end there because%u2026.

Some are worth far more in terms of "authority". It's called Page Rank or PR but has nothing to do with the search ranking position of a page. (It's named after Larry Page one of the founders of Google).

No-one knows for sure all of the components of PR (it's Google's equivalent of the Coke recipe) and to be honest, we don't need to know. We just need to see the PR of your competitor's links so we can assess which links are worth "emulating" and how many we need.

But not all PR sites are good - they need to be relevant to the page you want people to find.

For example, if you are a plumber, a high PR link from a law firm is going to be useful for sure, but a link from a plumbers' association will be more relevant so more value to you.

This is where it gets really tricky for a part-time optimiser because the tools to check PR aren't freely available so you have to invest in tools to do the job. And then learn how to use them etc. So for this part of link-building, you are best off using a search engine optimisation service.in Auckland . They should have the tools and more importantly, the understanding of what it all means.

The link is called the anchor text - yeah I know, more jargon - but using the right words as the link will set you apart. As a demonstration of the power of anchor text, check this out.

Most people link with click, here or more. (Search Google for "here" and you'll find Adobe Reader at 3 because people say "To open this pdf, click here for Adobe Reader." That's the power of the right anchor text. Hmm - so if you use the word "here" as your link, you'll be competing with over 12 billion (with a b)! I can guarantee that there will be far less competition if you use even your service name such as "accountant" or plumber. But what if you linked with "tax accountant" or better still "tax accountant in Auckland"? Or even better "tax planning accountant in Auckland"? Hmm - the competition is going to drop right down and you are going to zoom up the rankings.

So you know where your competitors link but how do you actually get them to link to you?

It's not easy to get a positive response from other website owners and many will want to exchange a link. This isn't a huge amount of value to you. You want one-way links.

So you have to look for other places - blogs, forums, places to leave meaningful comments to name a few. Here are a few more linking strategies. SEO linking tips

And this is definitely only for the experienced SEO company that knows how to find these places and then knows how to actually generate the link back to you. GIG Internet Marketing is a successful SEO consultancy service in Auckland and has helped many clients get to Page 1.