When doing SEO, one of the things that you will need to pay keen attention to is the kind of linking on your site. There are many dos and don’ts that you need to follow in order to ensure that your site is not penalized for having low quality links. If you are starting to do SEO for the first time, you should approach linking as a double-edged sword. When used correctly, it can improve your search engine rankings considerably. However, if the links to or from your site are of low quality, you are bound to end up suffering from penalties and low ranking. There are a few things that you need to do to ensure that your linking is correct, including:
Get rid of broken links
When you have many broken links on the site, the crawlers are going to penalize it. You need to keep tabs on all the different links on the site, and make sure that they lead to the right pages. If you have a very large website, you may find that it has too many links on it. This means that having to check each of them manually may not make a lot of sense. In such settings, you can try to use some of the automated link checking tools online. Some of them are free and you will need to pay for some. In many cases, the latter are often better since they are more accurate and work faster. Whatever method you choose to use, one thing you should never compromise on is making sure that you have working links on the site.
Get rid of links from low quality sites
When you have incoming links from low quality sites, they are bound to affect the rank of your page. For instance, if a particular page has been marked as spammy or not useful by the search engine crawlers, any other page that it links to may be placed under scrutiny to make sure that quality is not compromised. To avoid this, always make sure that all external links to and from your site connect it with a high quality website. If you have to use an SEO company to do linking in a bid to increase your pagerank, always make a point of inspecting the links yourself to make sure that they are not of low quality and won’t compromise you in future.
Create custom landing pages for broken links
However hard you try to optimize your linking, you will find that there are times when you will end up having a few pages on the site down. To ensure that you do not end up upsetting your customers, you should try to create a customized 404-error page rather than let them view the standard one. You can even use this page to offer alternative links that they can use. This is very useful when doing things such as moving your site from one domain to another, and also when restructuring a page. In terms of SEO, making sure that you have a custom landing page for broken links will also play a role in increasing or maintaining your page rank as well.
One tip you can use when making such a page is to make sure that the custom 404 page looks just like the other pages on the site. This way, people visiting the site will not be as disappointed to find that the page they are looking for is missing. This is because having a custom page gives the impression that the page is temporarily unavailable, while the stock 404-error page gives an impression that the page is permanently missing.
These are just a few of the ways in which you can ensure that you get high quality ranking through proper linking. The key thing to remember is that you need to make sure that the linking on your site is done in such a way that it makes it much easier for your customers to use the site more effectively. The above are just a few of the things you can do in order to effect this; there are many more. As long as you invest in them, you should find it much easier to make other SEO methods work better for you.