SEO Link Strategy

Why is link strategy important for SEO?

Google and other search engines use your links to identify what content on your site is related. It uses these links to build a picture of what content is of value.  In Google’s case it uses something called the Google Bot to crawl your website. As it hits your homepage it then follows the links from the page. As it branches out it builds a picture of the relationship between links and content. Knowing how this takes place is important to achieving a correct SEO link strategy.

Internal link value

Using a strategy of setting your primary page as your cornerstone. Then creating tail keyword links from secondary content or posts back to the cornerstone page is instrumental to success. However, link value is divided between all links on a page. Using “No-Follow” links in certain cases is necessary to stop your link value from being diluted. Google deems a page that has more links as being more popular and ranks it higher.

External Link value

External links from quality sources is paramount to any SEO link strategy. Creating quality content that will attract links naturally is your starting point for external links. Once you have your quality content in place, sharing this out via social media will aid greatly in attracting those external links.

Contextual Linking

Think of your website as a pyramid, the home page being the top, the midsection as your cornerstone articles, and the lower section as your secondary content. Your homepage links to your cornerstones, your cornerstones link to all your secondary content, and your secondary content will link back to your cornerstones. This is not to say that your secondary content has no place on your homepage, quite the opposite, you will see all new age websites showing off their posts directly on their homepages. So creating these links between content using contextual linking is an excellent means to improving your website Domain Authority and improving your SEO.