Ken McGaffin on why linking matters

Posted by Offer Tsuriel on October 27, 2009

McGaffin (2004) provides a great introduction to link building. The main principle of link building is as he says:

Create great content, link to great content and great content will link to you.

However, a structured link building campaign is also needed to maximize the number of quality inbound or backlinks which are from sites that have a high page rank and from pages with the right content and anchor text. Ken McGaffin recommends these stages in his report at www.linkingmatters.com:

1. Who links to you now? Set up Google Webmaster Tools for the best indication of links.
2. Who links to your competitors? Use the Yahoo! Site Explorer.
3. Which sites could link to you? It helps to categorize the types of site when building links, you will have relationships with many already.
4. Understand why external sites would link to you. It also helps to list all the types of content that could encourage links. In particular, content which naturally attracts links, which is known as linkbait. Examples include helpful tips, insightful articles and even lists of useful links (don’t be afraid to link out from a site). Viral content that people will discuss in blogs is particularly valuable.

 

5. Set objectives. Ask how much you hope to improve your PageRank, the number of links you will seek to gain and how this translates to visitors and competitive positions. This is particularly difficult since one quality link may be more worthwhile than ten poor quality ones which could be discounted by the search engines, or even damage your reputation.
6. Make sure your site is link friendly. You should have a URL strategy which means clear URLs that others can use on their site. Facilitating social media is part of this with many sites now having options to bookmark a site with Delicious or Google Bookmarks.
7. Which links are on your site? Having sections or articles with links out can encourage others to link to you. It is sometimes suggested that reciprocal links are 100% bad, but this is not the case so long as they are not part of link-exchanges. It is also sometimes suggested that links out are 100% bad, but this is not the case if they are useful for visitors and they can lead to you being seen as a hub by search engines.
8. Ask for inbound links. Although Ken and link-building experts such as Eric Ward (www.ericward.coml will rightly say that the best links are natural and generated by valuable content, obtaining links proactively is still a key aspect of link-building.
9. Track and improve.

But remember that it is link quality, not link quantity -you need to gain links from sources which the search engines trust.