Links are crucial in search engine optimization or SEO. Search engines put a lot of substance to them when trying to determine the importance and relevance of a site. The more links pointing to your website, the better your site becomes and the higher it will rank in the search engine results pages. However, this isn’t always the case because there are good links and there are bad links. One link from a reputable and respected website is better than a hundred links from unknown and shady websites. This is where the concept of the link pyramid is partially based. As its name implies, a link pyramid is a, well, a pyramid of links. There’s a top level where the target website is located, a second level of links, a third level of links, and so on and so forth. From top to bottom, the quality of links decreases. With that said, the links in the bottom level are very low quality links. They’re often composed of spammy links.
A lot of internet marketers often confuse link pyramids with link wheels when they are totally different things. In a link wheel, all link sources point to the target website. On the other hand, in a link pyramid, only the links on the level below the target website point to the website. All the rest of the links point to the other links on the level above them.
To illustrate how you can build a link pyramid for SEO, let’s try creating one using three levels of links: the base links, the mid-level links and the highest-quality links.
- The Base Links: These are the links on the bottom of the pyramid. If you’ve seen a pyramid, the bottom part is the largest part. So needless to say, base links compose the largest portion of the links on the pyramid. They are links of often low quality. These include links from social bookmarking sites, social networking sites, blog comments, inner pages, and smaller and lesser known online article directories. These links serve as the foundation of your link pyramid. The success of your link pyramid will be hugely affected by them.
- The Mid-level Links: These are links that have more authority than the links on the bottom of the pyramid. These links may pass more link juice than the base links but they’re not what you would call high-quality links. Examples of these are links from mini sites and sales letter sites or news release sites.
- The Highest-Quality Links: These are the links that are on the level just below the target website. They are very targeted, very relevant, and of very high quality. These links are very few in comparison to the links on the lower levels. The main purpose of the links on the lower levels is to push these high quality links and boost the link juice they pass to the target website.
Building a link pyramid for SEO may be very time-consuming but it’s all worth it, so long as you do it the right way, using the appropriate sites.
