One of the most commonly heard sentences in the world of SEO is ‘you need to get backlinks to your website.’ Now you may comment that this sentence is exactly what I advised everyone to do throughout my posts on link building in 2010. Of course, you’re a very bright reader and are absolutely right, I do believe this sentence offers very good advice. However, in this post let’s open up the doors to a few whispers I’ve heard online recently and look towards what I have come to believe formulates ‘best’ advice, especially for the launch of a new website.
Somewhere on your travels through online SEO forums, you may have come across the notion that to send all of your backlinks to your homepage is not a good idea as it looks positively un-natural to Google. Hence, learned SEO types will steer you towards what is known as ‘deep-linking’, where we create backlinks that point to webpages deeper within our website. Again, top stuff – follow this principle and you can’t go too wrong.
Now, here’s a little spin on the above that ‘right now’ works especially well for new websites, ie ones that are not yet indexed within Google (I’ll write a post on ultra fast Google indexing soon). For now, when you start building links to your website don’t link to your homepage at all. Instead, choose a really strong, well written page deeper within your website – a good, informative article published on your website works particularly well. Do your on-page SEO well for this page and target only one keyword for the page overall. Make sure this keyword is either the main target keyword for the website overall, or a very close derivative of it.
After some good initial link building (all links pointing to your inner page), you should find that Google finds both your linked inner page and your homepage – offering both as result options within search results. If you’re very lucky, you might even get a double listing!
So, why does this method work well? I believe it’s down to your new website giving Google the ‘impression’ that your website has gained popularity ‘virally’. In today’s online world people are far more likely to link to a specific video, sound file or webpage as opposed to an overall homepage. Building links to that inner webpage/article looks all the more natural to Google in today’s web 2.0 world and you will be rewarded for that.
In summary, reset your link target sights, aim deeper and launch!
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2 users responded in this post
Great tip, I have been linking to my homepage primarily (not a brand new website I might add) and content wise its far inferior to my main product detail page, so I will bare this in mind for my future links.
Your blog is by far the best ive come across in my SEO research so far, thank you Phil and keep the articles coming as im definitely a weekly viewer from now on and as you can tell im reading from your earliest articles up
Thanks for the kind words Tom, I hope some of the posts here help you get the rankings you want.
Phil
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