SEO for the Average Joe

Building link popularity is one of the key components to a strong SEO strategy. For the beginner or novice SEO, link building is one of the easiest ways to build strong rankings and authority for your web site or blog. There are many more advanced link building strategies, but this post will focus on four basic, but critical things to consider before diving in to building link popularity as an SEO strategy:

• Is your content relevant to the web site or blog that you want to linking to you?
  • Don’t consider acquiring links from web sites or blogs containing content that isn’t relevant to the content on your web site or blog.
  • Relevancy is weighted heavily by search engines when analyzing inbound links and calculating link popularity. If the content isn’t relevant, the inbound link is quite useless.
  • Think about the user and proper organization of the web when seeking out sites or blogs for inbound link building. Is your web page or blog content relevant or closely complimentary to what the user is reading? If not, move along.

• Is your content unique and does it provide any value to visitors?
  • If your content isn’t unique or offer some kind of value, link popularity will be hard to come by. Make sure your content is original and provides something useful for the visitor.
    For example: Don’t just list your products. Tell me about how they are different than the other options, and how they will make my life easier.

• Are you empowering others to build link popularity for you (social link building)?
  • Think of the social nature of the web. If someone thinks your web site or blog contains something actually helpful, unique, relevant, interesting, different, etc. they will probably link to it or share it with others.
  • Add social bookmarking and sharing functionality to your pages and allow your visitors to build inbound link popularity for you! Free services like AddThis and ShareThis are a great place to start for beginners.

• Does the web site or blog linking to you use “nofollow” attributes (incorrently referred to as nofollow tags) for outgoing links?
  • Simply put, the nofollow attribute is used to tell search engines that a link should not influence the ranking of the target page and web site in any way.
  • Format used for links: <a href=”http://www.sample.com/target-page” rel=”nofollow”>This is a nofollow link</a>
  • If a site uses the nofollow attribute, it will be useless to you for helping build link popularity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek out a link on this site if it is relevant. It just means that the benefit to your search engine ranking from that link in particular will be zero.
    
  • Commonly, blogs use nofollow in links from blog post comments.
  • Some sites use the nofollow attribute strategically for SEO purposes to sculpt PageRank and organize the flow of influence given by links. This is a strategy I may cover in future posts. How to find out if a site uses nofollow for outbound links:
    You can find out if a site uses this attribute by looking at a few pages on the site with outgoing links and viewing the page source code.
    1. in a browser, goto the “View” menu and select View Source)
    2. in the window containing your source code, goto the Edit menu and select “Find”
    3. in the find box enter “nofollow”
    4. look for the attribute in outbound links pointing to other web sites (not internal links pointing to pages on the same domain)
    5. If you find the attribute used in this format, <a href=”http://www.sample.com/target-page” rel=”nofollow”>This is a nofollow link</a>, the site uses the nofollow attribute

This is just a basic overview of some of the most important tips for building link popularity. There are many SEO strategies for effective link building, but high link popularity can be achieved with very little marketing or technical experience. Post a comment if you have any questions on this blog post. I’d love to discuss.