How to Optimize Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit

Many webmasters focus a majority of their time on building new links to their site with a variety of link building methods. While this is certainly an important part of SEO, it’s also beneficial to review your existing links to make sure you’re getting the most out of them.

Here’s a few simple ways to improve the SEO benefit of your existing link partners.

1. Optimize your anchor text
Anchor text is one of the most important parts of a link to your website. It’s very likely that some sites will be linking to you with less than optimal anchor text. In some cases this may be along the lines of “click here” or “learn more” but sometimes there is no anchor text at all.

Try contacting site owners and provide them with an example of how you would like the link to be changed. If they’re already linking to you, there’s a good chance they see value in your website and will help you out.

2. Correct broken links
You may also find that some link partners may misspell one of your URLs or link to a non existent page. Contact these webmasters to correct the error (you can even give them some anchor text suggestions at the same time). There are a number of free tools which can help you identify these pages.

3. Change the destination URL of your links
If you’re targeting specific pages as a part of your SEO strategy, try asking site owners to change the URL of their link. For example, you may want to redirect links from some of your inner pages to your homepage.

4. Asking for more links
When linking to your site, many webmasters will include a short description before or after the link. Try asking these link partners to provide some additional links to your site within this content – this also allows you to optimize the anchor text for these links.

If you’ve got any other tips to optimize existing links, be sure to share them via our blog comments below.

How to Optimize Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit | ineedhits