Advice offered on linking for SEO

22/08/2008

Tips on the best tactics to deploy when linking for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes have been offered by MarketingSherpa.

The research organisation said that high quality content such as useful tools and link bait like contests and giveaways are essential in getting others to link back to a company's website.

It is also vital to conduct research into the market and other websites operating in the same sector, the report asserted.

Targeting websites whose links are likely to have high value in the eyes of search engines is also important in SEO, as is getting content listed on bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit, MarketingSherpa said.

It went on to warn: "Do not ask every person linking to your site to use the same anchor text. Search engines penalise sites that have too many inbound links with the same text; it skews their results.

"They argue that 'naturally' created links would have more variance."

The BBC website has started to experiment with including external links within the article text of its stories, according to Graham Charlton of E-consultancy.