SEO Marketing: Back Links

By James Atkinson, LLB

Back links are still important. They help measure your site’s credibility, but not all back links are created equal. Quality will always beat quantity.

A few high-quality back links from authority sites will have much more value for you than a lot of low-quality back links you can buy or get through link exchanges. Chasing low-quality back links is not worth your time. Focus on gaining a few high-quality back links.

The best way to get high-quality back links is to create quality content - your site must be rich with informative, relevant information.

Quality content is what will get you accepted into directories like DMOZ and Yahoo.
A few links from these “800 pound gorillas” will enhance your credibility with the search engines immensely. Relevant links from social networks also help.

Site Structure is Important

It’s not just using a laundry list of the right keywords that the search engines consider relevant to your topic. It’s also how you design the structure of your pages and navigation.

You have to make sure that the search engines can easily tell which topics you are covering and how they relate to each other.

If you construct your site in an unclear way, the search engine spiders will get confused and it will not be clear what topics you are covering. They are after all just little “bots” who have very specific instructions when they spider a site.

If your site navigation structure is confused then the bot gets confused.

Remember, spiders and algorithms work to certain rules. Once you understand those rules, it’s easy to make the engines understand the topics and themes you are relevant for.

Themes and Silos

It’s crucial to theme your site so that the search engines see it as more relevant than your competitors. This may sound hard to do, but it’s not difficult.

In order to build a well-themed site that clearly tells the engines you are highly relevant to the topics you want to rank for, you need to build your site using a silo structure.

What is a silo? A silo is the basic building block of a well-themed web site. Just like a silo used to hold grain on a farm, a web site silo contains your themed content.

Would a farmer put rice and corn in the same silo? Well no. A silo keeps its themed content separate from other themes so they don’t dilute each other’s relevance.

A themed silo is basically a section of a site that covers a single theme and does not link out to anything that is not related to that theme.

This includes not linking to other pages on your site that are unrelated to the theme.

The content within the silo creates strong relevance for the theme, with the use of many different but strongly related keywords strengthening the theme.

Theme Bleeding – A Silent Rankings Killer

Content in a silo must not link to unrelated content outside the silo. Linking from one theme to another theme that is unrelated is called “theme bleeding” and it’s something most web sites inadvertently do all the time.

Theme bleeding confuses the search engine bots – they aren’t sure what your site is actually about.

If you confuse the search engine bot it will not consider your site to be 100% relevant to your topic, and it will be very difficult for you to achieve high rankings. Theme bleeding is a major reason why good sites don’t achieve high rankings.

The best way to avoid theme bleeding is to silo your site.

Siloing ensures that your themes are 100% clear to the search engines. Once the search engines consider you highly relevant to your themes, your job of ranking high becomes much easier.

After reading this article please go to Seo Marketing: Site Structure.

SEO Marketing: Introduction > Back Links

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