Link Placements

Link Placements

Where you place your link in your website is one of the most overlooked linkbuilding techniques of SEO specialists today. The importance of where your link exists in a page is critical. So what do you need to know about link placements?

This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School series: Linkbuilding Techniques

Usual parts of a webpage

  • Upper Body Content
  • Lower Body Content
  • Header
  • Footer
  • Sidebar

There will always be dispute about whether a site-wide link in a sidebar is better than just a single link from the content. In my personal opinion, having a site-wide link is good IF there are many pages from the linking site to you. But if there are few pages and there are lots of other outbound links in that specific sidebar, forget it.

The genius behind link placements

Google knows that people will put links in their sidebar, or that attribution links exists in the footer – such as WordPress links. Naturally, they devalue these links because they might not give any real value or reference to the website that they are pointing to.

Anatomy of A Webpage

Having links inside the body of the content is usually the link with importance and which gives reference to the website it points to. No webmaster just puts in links inside the body of the content without any relevance to the link they are pointing to. It makes the article ugly and it will disappoint the reader.

The best link placement

Arguably comes from the upper body of the content – with a good anchor text and a good, relevant body of text surrounding it.The body of the content is almost always crawled by the search engines. Being in the upper part of that body of content makes sure that your link is prioritized. The reason behind it is that Google’s search spider crawls the code from top to bottom.

The worst link placement

Well, it’s not really the worst. But since we have a limited 5-category choice, the link placement that supposedly has the ‘worst’ value is links from the footer. In most cases, footer links are placed there for the company who helped developed the website. In which case, it is not really relevant for readers and users.

What you have to do

So in looking for a link, make sure that you suggest to the webmaster (whom you’re getting a link from) to place your link somewhere in the header, or upper body of the content rather than on the sidebar (or worse, in the footer). Being mindful of your link placements can take you a long way because the value of the link varies depending on where your link exists in the webpage.

Tips for Keeps: You can apply this knowledge immediately as you interlink your own site. Make sure that you put in links inside the content – on the upper parts if you can.

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Sean Si

About Sean

is a Filipino motivational speaker and a Leadership Speaker in the Philippines. He is the head honcho and editor-in-chief of SEO Hacker. He does SEO Services for companies in the Philippines and Abroad. Connect with him at Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Check out his new project, Aquascape Philippines.