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Book Excerpt: What Are Authority Links?

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The following is an excerpt (with some recent modifications and editorial comments) from our book, WordPress Search Engine Optimization (now in second edition!). You can buy the book at Amazon.

Authority Links: What They Are and Why You Want Them

There is a measure of power that some links possess that is independent of PageRank and it is the principle of authority links. Authority links are links from websites that have established a substantial degree of trust and authority with search engines as a result of their age, quality, and size. Authority is a somewhat subjective concept. Unlike PageRank, neither Google nor the other search engines offer any public reference or guidelines as to what constitutes an authority site or authority link. Authority sites are going to be the market leading sites, sites representing established government and educational institutions, large corporations, or leading websites. Authority links can bring tremendous ranking power to a website if one is lucky enough to obtain one or more.

Authority links are the golden eggs of link building. They tend to be extremely difficult links to get, and for that reason most webmasters rarely get them. The best approach to authority links is to be vigilant for opportunities to obtain them, but it is most likely fruitless to waste time seeking them out.

Our discussion of PageRank and authority links leads naturally to the notion of the relative power of inbound links. No two links are the same in terms of power. The degree of authority of a site, the PageRank of the page upon which the link appears, and the number of outbound links on the page where your link appears will all effect the relative value of the links you obtain. That said, almost all links are worthwhile, even lower value links. With what we’ve learned in the previous few pages, you will have a strong sense of how to evaluate link opportunities and to evaluate the relative strength of links.

Sometimes, you’ll be forced to settle for lower value links but in higher volumes, as is the case with link directories. But never fall into the trap of thinking that the only links worth getting are high-authority, high-PageRank links. All links are good for your rankings (except links from link farms and content farms, from which you should never seek out links).

Link Anchor Text

A vital concept in link building is link anchor text. Link anchor text is the word or words that constitute the visible text of the link itself, the “blue underlined text” as it is often called. The anchor text of a link is a powerful ranking factor; anchor text serves as a signpost to Google as to the content and subject of the destination page.

How Anchor Text Appears in HTML Code

The anchor text of a link is coded by placing the desired text between the open and closing markup of the hyperlink:

<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">This Is Anchor Text</a>

Controlling the link anchor text of inbound links is vital whenever possible. The problem is that you can’t always control the anchor text of inbound links. And unfortunately, the higher quality the link, the more restricted you’ll be in choosing anchor text. A perfect example is the Yahoo Directory. A link in the Yahoo Directory is a great link to get, but Yahoo dictates that the anchor text you select be the name of your website or the name of your business. Yahoo does not allow you to stuff keywords into the anchor text. Here lies another good reason to choose a keyword-rich domain name for your website and business. When your business name is carefully crafted to comprise keywords, like “Austin Air Conditioning,” then you can employ those high-volume keywords more easily in your link building efforts.

To continue an example from an earlier chapter, if you have identified the phrases “Jacksonville air conditioning,” “Jacksonville air conditioning contractors,” “Jacksonville air conditioning companies,” and “Jacksonville air conditioning repair,” as the keywords around which a specific page is built, then your anchor text selection is nearly complete. You can use the same keywords as your desired anchor text.

When you can control the anchor text, you should craft the anchor text of links based on the keywords you have designated for each destination page. With this device used in connection with sound on-page optimization, tremendous ranking power comes into focus. Remember that Google and the other search engines have a primary goal of returning quality search results to their visitors. When anchor text accords with the on-page elements of a web page, that gives search engines confidence as to the subject of that page. And, when a search engine is confident about subject matter, it rewards the page with high rankings.

But be careful with anchor text when gaining links in high numbers. It is unwise to secure hundreds of links all with picture-perfect anchor text; this manner of link building does not appear natural to search engines. There is a risk of over-optimization when your link anchor text is too perfect. Generally, you never want more than 70% of your anchor text for a particular page to be solely based upon a small family of perfect keywords. Thus, there is a hidden benefit to garnering links for which you can’t control the anchor text because these links dilute your principal keywords to some extent.

If your anchor text isn’t varied naturally, then you should intentionally vary the anchor text. Clever SEO professionals sometimes go as far as to obtain noise links. A noise link is a link with common generic terms used as the anchor text like “click here,” or “website.”

Not all hyperlinks have anchor text. Images can be hyperlinks, but do not use anchor text. In this case, search engines register the link but have no anchor text upon which to determine the subject matter of the link. Links in image maps and flash files suffer from the same limitation. For this reason, such links are less desirable.

Buy the Book Today at Amazon

How to Promote an Infographic

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Infographics have emerged as a sound, white-hat way to generate high-quality natural backlinks. Even a moderately successful infographic can go viral and bring a few dozen high-quality backlinks. But creating an infographic—as much work as that is—only gets you halfway there.

If you cleverly promote your infographic, you can greatly increase your chances of going viral and generating higher numbers of backlinks. We know because we’ve done a fair amount of infographic development here at TastyPlacement.

The Quid Pro Quo of Infographics

The name of the game in infographic promotion is that a webmaster gets to display your hard-earned content (the infographic) and in return, you earn a backlink from the website displaying the infographic. A preliminary task in promoting your infographic is to place your infographic where it is easy to find and in a manner which is easy for webmasters to employ.

Set Up Your Infographic “Home”

First, pick a “home” for your infographic—this ideally should be the same site where you want to send your backllinks. Your home location will house the infographic itself (1000 pixels wide is fairly standard), and ideally an “on-page display” version for the page itself for faster loading and easier visibility on a typical webpage (about 540 or 600 pixels wide), a mini-thumbnail for Facebook shares (more on this in a minute) and of course, your recommended embed code.

Your embed code should be dead easy for any webmaster to simply grab in a block. The embed code should be simple html, and should contain the entire “package” for the infographic: the on page display version, a link to the full infographic as well as author attribution and your desired links.

When we promote infographics, we host the preview image and the full infographic—it’s just too complicated to ask webmasters to download the infographic, install it on their site, then update all the links. By hosting the images, you make it easy and idiot proof. Because we are hosting the infographic, and the files are large, we create our infographics in jpeg format: that allows us to compress the file down for faster loading and less bandwidth usage.

To see all these elements coming together on a proper infographic “home.” see the page we’ve set up for our “Austin Startup Scene” infographic here:

https://tastyplacement.com/start-up-infographic

Include a Facebook-Ready Thumbnail

You will also notice another element on that page: a square thumbnail of the infographic at the bottom of the page. We added that thumbnail to our infographic page after we learned that when someone posts a share link on Facebook, Facebook will search the page for roughly square-shaped images to offer as a thumbnail choice to represent the share. Because infographics tend to be very tall images, Facebook won’t generate a thumbnail from the full infographic. You have to hand-feed an agreeably-sized thumbnail.

Now Let’s Promote: Make it Searchable

With our infographic set up and set to share, you want to make sure your infographic can be easily found in search engines. Make sure you’ve got the terms “free” and “infographic” in your title tag and body copy. “Free infographic” is searched 2900 times a month in Google, as reported by the Adwords keyword tool.

Finding Webmasters With MyBlogGuest

[update] When we originally posted this thread, we recommended MyBlogGuest as a means of reaching promotion-minded webmasters. We no longer recommend MyBlogGuest as a responsible means of promotion.

Promote Through Social

Promote your infographic through your Twitter account with #free #infographic hash tags. Include a shortened URL with a link to your infographic home. You should also post a link to your personal and business Facebook pages. We think it’s ok to re-post an infographic every few weeks.

Promote through Infographic/Visual Graphic Directories

We promote our infographics through infographic and visual graphic directories. These diretories exist for the purpose of displaying and housing infographics. You’ll get a mix of dofollow and nofollow links from these directories, and you’ll get the chance for webmasters to find you there. Below is the list of sites we employ (Visual.ly is easily the most popular and authoritative of this group):

  • http://www.infographicsarchive.com/submit-infographics/
  • http://submitinfographics.com/
  • http://infographicsite.com/submit-infographic/
  • http://visual.ly
  • Reddit.com/r/infographics/
  • http://www.nerdgraph.com/submit-infographic/
  • http://www.infographicfile.com/
  • http://www.infographiclove.com (this is a paid submission)

To find more locations for submission, try a Google search for (keep the quotes) “Submit Your Infographic”. That query will yield sites with infographic submission forms.

Use Specialized Searches to Find Bloggers and Webmasters

If you really want to take your infographic promotion to the next level, you can do a little curation of specific websites. This technique is going to take a bit more time, but will generate the highest value links.

First, let’s search for existing sites that display infographics. It makes sense that a webmaster that already displays infographics would probably post another in the same topic area. For our sleep infographic, we think our content would be valuable to sleep doctors. So we enter a Google query as follows: “sleep doctor” infographic. This query led us to a few sleep doctors and mattress and pillow manufacturers that already display infographics. One mattress manufacturer has an active blog with a PageRank of 4. We’d like to get a link on that site, so the next step is to write an email to that webmaster. So, we wrote the following message:

“Hi, we were browsing the site __________.org, and we notice 
you display Infographics for your readers. We have a useful
Infographic on sleep science that you can display for free
on your site. We've already coded the HTML so all you would
need to do is paste in the code to your website. You can
find the Infographic here: [link to infographic page/embed
code]. 

If you have any questions about how to post the Infographic
on your site, please let me know. “

Good luck using these tips in promoting your infographic. If your infographic is attractive and useful to readers, you should have have no trouble in ultimately generating 100s of links.

Why SEO Campaigns Take Time

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A common question I hear from customers is “when will I see strong rankings from my SEO work?” That’s a good question, and there are several reasons why SEO is more “process” than “event”. Let’s take it step-by-step and break down why SEO campaigns take a little time to develop their full power.

Getting Links Takes Time

First of all, securing inbound links takes time. A typical white hat SEO campaign will involve writing to other websites and web directories and inviting those other websites to link to our own. Without an SEO campaign, links from other websites take years to develop naturally. One way of looking at an SEO campaign is a process that accelerates what would occur naturally. And, as we all know, inbound links are counted by all great search engines as a “vote”–sites with inbound links are deemed stronger, and hence are ranked better.

This process of writing to other websites takes time. Even if you or your SEO consultant completed say, 100 requests in a day, the webmasters of those 100 other sites may not get around to answering immediately. I have received messages back from other websites over a year after I have made the link request. So, you’ll get some links quickly, and some links will take much longer. The good news is that when you do undertake link requests, you can reasonably expect that your requests will bear fruit down the road, and it’s good to know that you’ve got some links that will be coming in months down the road. It’s like saving for a rainy day.

Once You Get an Inbound Link, It Takes Time for That Link to Be Indexed

Now, let’s assume that a few weeks have passed, and you have secured 50 valuable inbound links from 50 great websites all pointing to yours; remember, you requested 100 and you will never get every link you ask for so this example might even be very rosy. Some webmasters will never answer your request, and some will not link back for whatever reason.

But, so far so good, you have some links pointing into your site.

But wait–Google and Yahoo may not get around to indexing those 50 pages for days or weeks. Google will generally index most sites in 3 to 4 weeks; Yahoo takes quite a bit longer, and MSN longer still (as these 2nd tier search engines improve their technology, look for their indexing speed to catch up; they are slow to index and they know it). And, until the search engines update their indexes of the pages that link to your site, it’s as if the link doesn’t exist.

And if that wasn’t complicated enough, search engines are not slaves to webmasters–search engines do not index every page they find. So, even if Google comes upon a web page with a link to your site, it may index that page immediately, it may return a few times before the page is indexed. In that case, some links may take months to be indexed.

Only after your link is indexed do you enjoy the inbound linking power that that site gives you.

The Sites that Link to You Have to Wait for Their Links Too

And, don’t forget that the sites that link to you are “living” websites too. The strength of their web presence is based upon the links that they receive–and that landscape is constantly changing. When your site is new, the sites willing to link to you are going to tend to be new as well. As such, the inbound linking power of the sites that link to you will tend to be on the lite side. However, those sites will grow into stronger sites as they age, and then the inbound links that you enjoy from other sites will rise with that tide.

The Sandbox Effect

And then, of course, there is the sandbox effect. The sandbox effect refers to the phenomenon of a temporary ranking penalty applied to newer websites that undergo rapid expansion in either size or inbound links. The effect is fiercely debated and never conclusively proven either for or against.

Google’s informal mouthpiece, Google employee Matt Cutts, has publicly stated: “[t]here are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries.” Mr. Cutts’ statements are carefully crafted, frustratingly rare, and are widely regarded as extremely reliable.

And so, the sandbox effect may serve to temporarily dampen the effects of any promotional campaign that you undertake.

The lesson? Patience.