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Five Ways to Get the Best of Existing Backlinks to Your Website
Next to content, what is of paramount importance in SEO is backlink. Links of higher quality and in greater quantity from websites with high PageRank are supports for a fledgling website to make it to the top of search engine result pages. That is why, SEO personnel, especially link builders stop at nothing while on the lookout for new and better links. Only a few SEO professionals think of existing backlinks and try to make the most of them. A link builder drives his effort toward garnering more and more links. I have explored five ways in which you can get the best of your existing back links.
Redirect Backlinks from the Old Domain to the New Domain
Matt Cutts in an interview with Eric Enge confirmed that the use of a 301 Re-direct can result in the loss of page rank to some extent. Basically, 301 re-directs are not looked upon as an infallible panacea from SEO perspectives. When it comes to back links, you can use 301 re-directs in redirecting one domain URL to another and one page link to the other one. But as a result, some of the link popularity of your website may be lost. “Do” and “All” are the key words in link building. The existing backlinks from different websites to your old domain can drive the fullest of their force to the new domain. Contact those sites and ask them to redirect their links to your new domain. Why to let the old backlinks go in waste?
Redirect the Backlinks from the 404 Pages to the Live Pages
Find the backlinks to the 404 pages of your website and redirect them to the live pages. Following the 404 links to the live pages may be an irritating user experience for the visitors to your website. The process is at times a bit longer. However, it is a good opportunity to retina the density of link juice of your website. It is similarly effective as redirecting 301 links from an old domain to a new domain. It is an incentive for SEO professionals as they can keep their clients happy by keeping the link popularity of their sites intact through 404 redirects.
Rephrase Existing Anchor Texts to Put Existing Backlinks in Use
Make ideal anchor texts of the existing backlinks to your website. It is a common mistake to turn a part of a long key phrase into an anchor text. Such partly hyperlinked anchor texts can drive the visitors to the targeted pages of a website but they bear no fruits when it comes to promoting the keyword raking of the site. Placing a backlink near a keyword is of no use. Make sure to include the words of a key phrase while hyper linking it with a backlink to a particular page of the website. So, review the existing anchor texts and rephrase them if necessary to put the backlinks in use.
Add Internal Links to the Strongest Pages of the Website
Identify the strongest sub-pages of your site. Using a strongest sub-page tool like SEOQuake for Firefox makes it easy to do. The pages with a maximum of links are the strongest. Once the pages are identified, add internal links to them. It works to let the power of the backlinks to those pages flow to other parts of the site. Target the anchor texts of those strongest sub-pages to add internal links.
Have a Go at Co-citation
The links surrounding a backlink can affect the value of the link. But links from the websites of your competitors and other trusted resources to your website can push up your site ranking. Co-citation is a way to enhance the relevance of your site to the sites linking to yours. Having backlinks from sites of the same relevance as yours is highly effective.