Spanish Real Estate forum - Spanish property - Estate agentsSpanish Real Estate forum - Spanish property - Estate agents

Richie · 07-22-2008, 11:11 AM

One thing that seems to really get me down is link building, link building is a hugely time consuming and boring process that unfortunately has to be done, looking for places to build links and good quality ones at that are harder to come by.

After reading some good articles on link building I spent some time over the past couple of days renewing old content or old threads by doing some internal linking.

Within 1 hour or so I managed to do over 50 - 60 new internal links which have some have already been picked up by the search engines.

So if you have got a spare hour or so, or when you are looking for links - go through old pages of content that you maybe wrote quite a while ago that has not been touched for sometime, and renew it by linking to newer content that is on your website.

You will be surprised to see how many new internal links you will be able to generate within your own website.

Homefinder · 07-22-2008, 01:33 PM

I find that really interesting. I never bothered much about internal linking except that every page has a navigation bar that links every page to the main pages, an .html sitemap and an .xml sitemap.
The SREF is generated dinamically, so there is probably a lot that can be done here linking pages together with similar content.

What Richie's post really has driven home for me is the need to re-write pages on a regular basis, which I have neglected recently.
This can be extremely rewarding and is really just a case of slightly adapting the targeted keywords, altering the META tags accordingly, switching paragraphs around, changing the body text a bit and altering the anchor text to any links.
Just 10 minutes can give a page a new "lease of life".

Thinking about external linking, I agree that linking to other sites really is time-consuming, boring work. Meanwhile writing to forums, blogs and articles can be a lot more fun and possibly just as effective.
Miguel's various posts about the Decreto 218 must be one of the longest ever. If you search on releated keywords you will see that his SREF posts are all over the place.

Homefinder

eyeonspain · 07-23-2008, 01:03 PM

Yeah, people often overlook the value of optimised internal links. I did the same thing about 6 months ago and although it's a pain in the a*** it is worth it.

One thing to note though, if you have say two links on a page pointing to one other page, and both links have different link texts, you actually only get the benefit of the text in the first link.

This is very easy to test and I noticed it when I was sorting my internal links.

One common error is where in the menu the link text says "home" and then further down there is a link pointing back to the home page with the link text "property in spain" then only the "home" text link counts.

You can overcome this by careful use of nofollow links.

Hope some of that makes sense.

Homefinder · 07-23-2008, 01:59 PM

Quote:

This is very easy to test and I noticed it when I was sorting my internal links.

Now I am bewildered. How can I test internal links?
Lets say that I have a link on my homepage with the anchor text "Moraira Property Enquiry Form". I search, either normally or for links, against this phrase and I see that the form features in the search results.
How do I know that it got there due to the internal link from the homepage.
Pehaps I am searching wrong? Perhaps I should be searching with Webmaster Tools?
I obviously need to pay more attention to internal links.

Homefinder

Richie · 07-23-2008, 03:24 PM

Well, I had and still do have hundreds of threads that I did not add any links in to the forum, inter linking between thread and psots that I have posted a while back, what I have been doing is not only doing the ones with links just to the homepage, but also to other posts and threads that are good information that are related to what the original member posted about.

Remember, after a period of time with this forum, the posts and threads are achieved - so many of the links that you see already on the navigation on the top and to the right hand side are not visible so adding in a couple of links here and there is great when the bots come along to search old content.

I do not know how you can tell which one it is picking out, but inside google analytics it does say some where what the bots see and think of your site as because of anchor text that you have done on links.

Would like to know, eyeonspain says that it will pick out home instead of the other link that you have done for your homepage, I do not know if that is to do with link age or position of which it searches first???

Interesting one that...

eyeonspain · 07-24-2008, 01:49 PM

For link order you have look at the html code as CSS can change the order on the screen.

Now, most sites have the header logo as a link pointing back to the home page, such as this forum does. Most sites, unknowingly, have the wrong alt text in this link, which is usually the first one in the html.

This forum doesn't have that problem as the first link to the home page is the h1 tag right at the top which contains the relevant keywords.

Here's what I did to test this theory. In my footer I put a link back to my home page with the link text "best spanish property website". Now this is quite uncompetitive so I should have gone to number 1 quite easily for this. But I didn't. In fact the page never ranked for that phrase on the strength of the link, it only ranked (lower down in the result) for the actual text from the link on the page.

Does that make any sense??