Here is a fun link building graph.

The main takeaway from this graph is that you only get value (in the form of links) when you give it (in the form of quality content).

Have fun!

P.S.: Click on the graph to get a better view.

A Fun Infographic on Link Building is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

There are several types of inbound links a website can get, each with a different value associated with them.  Here we will explore a few of them:

Contextual

A contextual inbound link is usually a one-way link that appears to be the most natural, and therefore has the most value.  This is a link pointing to you within the body text of another website, and links to you with descriptive text.  This could be a blog post, news article or other.

Sidebar

A sidebar link is one that appears in the sidebar of a page, and is usually replicated through many or every page of the site.  Every modern blog has a sidebar, and is usually filled with links and resources to other sites.  Some of these can provide value such as a descriptive text link, versus an image.

Footer

A footer link is one that appears in every page way down at the bottom of the page.  It usually contains credits to the companies that design, build and host a website.  These are considered to be lower in value than a contextual or sidebar link.

Reciprocal

Reciprocal links are websites that exchange links with each other, usually on a “Links” page or similar.  These have been heavily devalued over the years, as search engines started to see a trend of massive link building with sites that were not at all related.  Some reciprocal links are good if they come from authoritative sources, the content is related, and are not the majority type of links pointing to the site.  Read our other blog post on why reciprocal links are bad.

4 Types of Inbound Links And Which Are The Best Ones To Get is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Anchor text refers to the text that is highlighted and underlined on a website that points to another website. For an image, the anchor text is contained in the alt tag, which is visible in the HTML.

Many sites have inbound links with general and non-descriptive text. This is no fault of yours, it’s just that the referring site did not understand the SEO value in pointing to you correctly.

Let’s look at an example of good and poor anchor text:

Poor anchor text
“Pear Analytics has software to help manage search engine optimization with a variety of plans and pricing.”

Better anchor text
“Pear Analytics, a company that builds search engine optimization software, offers a variety of plans and pricing.”

In the poor example, the site is pointing to us with our brand name. In reality, most sites will not have difficulty in ranking high for their company or brand name. If this link was from an especially good source, it would be a waste of inbound link potential. An even worse example of inbound link anchor text is “click here.”

In the better example, the site is linking to us with much a more precise and descript key phrase. This helps the search engine determine what the page is about, and the more inbound links with that exact anchor text, the higher we will eventually rank for that word or phrase.

SiteJuice offers an extensive analysis of your inbound links, ranking them from best to worst. You can easily see the anchor text pointing to you, and target text changes on the more valuable links.

How the Right Anchor Text on Inbound Links Can Improve Search Engine Rankings is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

What exactly is anchor text?

Well, anchor text is a common term we use in SEO to refer to the text links on a webpage.  These links are highly valuable in helping you rank for the search terms you desire.

The concept is fairly simple: make a list of the terms you would like to rank well for in Google or other search engines, and create links to your webpages with that as the linking text.  For example, if I want to rank well for “free SEO analysis”, then I would try to put that as linkable text on as many high authority and trusted websites as I could.  This is why if you were to copy the script for our free customizable widget for the Website Analyzer, you will see a link like this on the widget: a free SEO analysis by Pear Analytics.  The link brings the user to the page I want, and has the proper text in the link.  It is important that the copy on the page has to do with the anchor text as well.  Try to have the words in the link on the page somewhere, preferably in the title tag as well.  If you do any Google AdWords campaigns, you would be familiar with this methodology since this is the same general concept around the Quality Score (the ad has to be relevant to the page it is pointing to).

It works, and we proved it

Last week, my friend Nan Palmero wanted to know how he could rank high for the term “blackberry power user”.  If you know Nan, then you know that he really is the ultimate user of the BB.  At the time, he ranked somewhere on the third page of Google for this search term.  He frequently blogs for some big sites with lots of trust, like blackberrycool.com, mysa.com and others.  I found out that he was linking his name to his blog, so I asked him to go back to all of his old blog posts and change the anchor text from “Nan Palmero” to Nan Palmero, Blackberry Power User.  The next day he was on the first page of Google.

Try it, and let me know how it worked out for you.

The Power of Anchor Text is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.