April 15th, 2010 by Mike

Domain trust and PageRank values go hand in hand. Deep link building has an important role to play in this, and should be part of any SEO link building plan. However, many people don’t realise this, and focus all their attentions on the homepage.

It’s true that search engine page ranking systems give the highest ranking priority to the homepage. You can test this yourself, by clicking on the homepage of a large, well respected site such as Amazon. The deeper you go with internal links, the closer the PageRank value will go to zero. However, the homepage will almost always have the highest PageRank (for the newcomers, there are free online SEO tools to check this).

When looking at SEO strategies, it’s important to realise that domain trust revolves around your homepage and the PageRank it achieves. This rank value is then passed on to the first, second and third level of your site. These are, respectively, the category pages, sub-categories and product pages, and are what SEO link building services collectively call link juice. Generally, the level one pages attract the most link juice from the site’s homepage.

The ranking algorithm obeys a gradual slope rather than a rapid downwards tumble, and remember, the easier your site is to navigate, the higher your internet reputation will be. However, if your site has a large number of sub-categories and different products, each with their own page, your PageRank distribution will cease to be proportional. You may find a few pages attract a high level of link juice, while the majority attract little or none.

A short while ago, practically every search engine optimization company on the net was talking about PageRank sculpting. This is the method by which the strength of certain internal pages is increased by preferentially controlling the flow of link juice from the homepage. Generally, the pages were those containing poorly performing products. SEO professionals would generally modify the internal architecture of the site to place more emphasis on those pages.

Anchor text can be used to improve page ranking through internal links, and is essential to any SEO campaign. It is the embedded hyperlink that will take you to the appropriate internal page, and can be used very effectively in blog postings. For example, if you’re an SEO company, and want people to link to your link building services, you might type a sentence like “Link building strategies are useful because”. Clicking on “link building strategies” would direct the user to a new page about link building. The page that opens would often feature the keyword ‘link-building-strategies’ at the end of the URL.

For effective link building, it’s essential your site has an integrated and informative blog with plenty of anchor content, ideally this will also be your keywords. It works two ways: your blogs will generate link juice to selected product pages, and the search engines will find it easy to index them, thus improving your page rankings. This is why search engine optimization services place such a heavy emphasis on blog content.

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