There’s no doubt about it, link building is one of the foundations of any SEO campaign, and many would argue that it is THE most important aspect of SEO. It’s so important that some SEO companies focus entirely on finding links. However, before you start grinding out your links, you’ll want to read this article.
Recently, I was conducting a link building campaign and utilizing Link Diagnosis (one of my favorite tools) to analyze some competitor’s sites. While going through the list of competitors, checking their links for potential contacts, I came upon a site ranking highly for a fairly competitive keyword phrase. The site’s links were weak and carried relatively little weight; however, the site was outranking competitors for this particular keyword phrase. After further analysis, I discovered that two of its links came from a site with the keyword phrase directly in the URL. Which leads me to this conclusion…
As ranking advantages seem to be given to URLs containing a specific keyword phrase, so too are advantages given to links containing a particular phrase in the URL. For instance:
For the keyword phrase ‘blue widgets’ a link from www.gizmos.com is less valuable than a link from www.bluewidgets.com, assuming both sites have the same page rank (Yes, I think page rank still has value and can be used as a relative barometer for a site’s importance).
How does this help you and how can you implement this knowledge?
When conducting your link campaign, don’t overlook the value of ‘in URL’ keyword phrase links. Try typing ‘inurl:keyword phrase’ into Google and, from there, searching for potential links.
