Sir Linksworthy and the Journey to the Tower of Inbound Strategies

Ahh, the topic of link building for a new site fresh off the turnip truck. Before the quest for golden links and outreach can begin, it’s often advisable to first take care of a number of website preliminaries, to increase the probability of your strategy succeeding by maximizing the effectiveness of any new inbound links.

1. Increase Page Loading Speed

Site speed is clearly a factor now being used by search ranking algorithms. You should therefore try to increase the speed at which your website loads and responds to requests from visitors. For better results, you should use a web hosting service that offers faster page load and constant uptime.

A dedicated server is best, but this isn’t always within the scope of everyone’s budget. If you decide to go with a shared hosting account, choose a host that doesn’t overload their servers by packing websites in like proverbial sardines.

2. Overcome the Urge to Stuff Those Meta Tags

Back in ye olde days of search, websites could often rank high by simply stuffing keyword phrases in meta tags. This involved the addition of select keywords in the image alt tags, keyword tags, description and meta title. On some websites, the content was not even related to the tags.

If you try this strategy today, chances are that your website will be penalized, or filtered by search engines. Therefore, you should avoid overstuffing these tags, just choose a relevant phrase that describes your content accurately, weave that into your tags naturally and stick to that.

3. Avoid Anchor Text Repetitions

It was also considered standard practice when web masters would link back to their sites with inbound hyperlinks referring back to the name of the service or product on offer. For instance, if you were selling “red pantaloons”, the more the number of matching external or internal links you could get by using the phrase red pantaloons, the higher your rank.

Today, search engine algorithms are more advanced, indeed Google’s Penguin update of april 2020 is evidence of this. Today Websites with overstuffed anchor text backlink profiles could be discounted, filtered or penalized.

Instead, you should try and diversify the anchor text linking to your website. A high number of brand links coming in looks natural and should help improve the success of your SEO strategy.

4. Vanquish Overall Website Over Optimisation

Over Optimization is a catch- all phrase used to refer to the unceasing repetition of SEO terms. Some web designers still think that by mentioning a particular term until they are blue in the face will definitely improve the website rank for that particular phrase.

For instance, if you are selling silver cutlery, you might include the term ‘silver cutlery’ in the description and title tags, H1 header, add it 10 times in your 500 word article and also in the footer link pointing back to your home page. You may also create shoddy links back to your website and include this phrase. This worked a treat in 1997, however today it is unadvisable because it will only thwart your attempt at achieving a toptastic search ranking.

5. Deal With Duplicate Content

Content on your web pages should not match others on your website or elsewhere on the internet. If you have several pages with exact or very similar content, it is probably better to 301- redirect these pages and consolidate that information into a single authoritative page instead. You can also rewrite your content to make it unique. Check for duplicate content using Copyscape or lesser known tools such as Duplichecker.