Link Strategy

A good link-building campaign is the single most important part of search engine optimisation.

Without the right links to the right pages, a website will never achieve high rankings in the major search engines.

Thanks to continual R&D we know exactly which links are going to help our clients rank and which we can safely ignore – this efficiency and attention to detail means we can achieve top rankings in most industries with a fraction of the links your competitors have.

Google is built around the famous PageRank algorithm developed in 1998 by two Sanford PhD students (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). PageRank assumes that all hyperlinks between web-pages are citations and votes for the target page or document – the more pages that are linking to a particular document, the more important it must be.

All modern search engines use link based algorithms to determine where are particular website should rank for any given keyword but in the ten years since PageRank was invented things have moved on at pace.

One major factor in the Google algorithm is something called Trust – different to the kind you need when working with a digital agency, but similar in its meaning. Impossible to see and totally unquantifiable this can make or break an SEO campaign. Trust is passed through links from extremely well known websites such as the BBC, CNN & major newspapers, before filtering down through the sites that they link to – the harder a link is to get, the more trusted it’s likely to be.

Google is known to look at over 100 off-site factors in determining rankings, including:

• Contextual relevance
• Link location on the page
• Age of the link
• Trust & reputation of the linking website
• Relevance to the site receiving the link
• Relevance to the site and page giving the link
• Co-citation (relevance of other nearby links)
• Diversity of the overall link campaign
• Overall trust and number of linking domains

Determining the exact links required to make a website rank highly is a highly complicated science requiring a large amount of pattern analysis – actually going out and building those links is an art form requiring skills such as relationship building, creativity and a good telephone manner.

Link Profile Optimisation

At Branded3 we deal we take on quite a few clients who are having trouble driving rankings and have had problems working with low quality SEO agencies in the past. A lot of these sites have highly unnatural and over-optimised link profiles and once Google identifies this the site will always struggle to rank without some kind of clean-up process.

Our link-profile optimisation process involves a full link audit followed by a cleanup operation using bespoke tools to contact any low quality websites and arrange for links to be removed. We work with clients to create a link profile that appears natural and will form a solid basis for moving forwards and generating long term sustainable rankings without the risk of link devaluation in the future.