Link Building and SEO
Why Is Link Building Important For SEO?
There are a couple of very good reasons that links are an important search engine optimization technique:
#1: Inbound links can boost your search result rankings
Up until about 3 years ago search engines would determine your website ranking primarily on the on-page factors. Factors such as keyword density and meta-tag information. It didn’t take long for hucksters to game the system. Webmasters would stuff their pages full of keywords by adding lines of irrelevant keywords at the page bottoms of their sites. Many of them would format the text color of these stuffed keywords to match the page background color. That way human visitors would not see this list of totally irrelevant words, but the search engine spider that crawls the code would. The idea of course was to get a better ranking on lots of search terms.
The websites with good and original content often didn’t concern themselves with SEO, these websites dropped to the bottom of the search results pages. The outcome for the people searching for something was bad. They might be searching for “contractors” and end up on a pornograhic website.
Link Sniper
Today search engines, such as Google, look for the quantity and quality of incoming links to your website to help determine the relevance and importance of your website. Each link coming into your website is considered a “vote” for that page. The websites with more votes will have a greater potential for ranking higher in the search engines. Votes from highly trusted websites are the highest ranking votes. An incoming link from a page rank 6 website is valued more than a link from a page rank 3 site.
Incoming links play another important role in your page rankings: They can help to determine the keywords for which your page will rank. If a website links to yours using the anchor/link text, “SEO link building”, then the search engine assumes they are saying that your page is relevant to “SEO link building”. You get one “vote” for “SEO link building”. If there are many links/votes from different sites that use “SEO link building” the search engines will assume your page is extremely relevant to that topic. The next thing you know your site will be ranking high for “SEO link building” in the search results.
#2: Links will bring more traffic to your site
Beyond the fact that incoming links will boost your search engine rankings, they will also bring additional traffic to your website. Some webmasters form a myopic view when they begin to optimize a website. Their thinking is that if the link doesn’t improve their SEO score they are not interested in hearing about it or fooling with it.
Lets assume the reason they are trying to improve their SEO score is to get higher rankings in search results and higher rankings will bring more traffic. If you have an incoming link from another website that can give you more traffic, then it’s a good link! It shouldn’t matter necessarily if it will boost your search engine rank. In many ways that link can give you better traffic, especially if the other site is relevant to your site.
Here are a few questions about link-building that I often get :
Q: Should incoming links be to my homepage, or should there be links to other pages on my site?
A: Search engines may suspect something is wrong if every link points to your Home page. If you have interesting content on your site, people will link directly to the page with the content and not to your Home page. When you are building your incoming links, you should attempt to get about 30% or more pointing to your website’s internal pages. This is called “deep linking”.
Q: Are some links better than others?
A: Yes. Higher quality links better than low quality links. Link quality is based on four primary factors:
- The rank and trust factor of the website that is linking to you. For example, The Drudge Report versus a random news website.
- Where the link is located on the webpage. Links in the top 1/3 of the page are better than on the bottom 1/3. Also, if there are only four links on the page opposed to 50 links.
- The anchor text relevancy: “Remodeling Contractor” versus “Click Here”.
- The page the link is on in the website structure. Is the link on the Home page, an internal relevant topic page, or some insignificant page like an “Associates” page or “Link To Us” page.
In the next article I’ll explain how and where to get high quality links.
Related Posts -
Back Links and Web 2.0 Using Web 2.0 Resources to Get Back Links What is Web 2.0? This is a term coined a few years ago to describe the "new" interactive internet. Evolving web technologies allow people to get more involved with websites — gone are the days when all you could do on the...... -
Are your web pages indexed? A problem I run into once in awhile is not getting all of my web pages indexed by the search engines. Indexing means that a search engine has the web page listed in its database. If the page isn't indexed it will not show up in a search for the...... -
4 Critical Off-The-Page SEO Factors 4 Critical Off-The-Page SEO Factors In my previous post, we talked about the things you can do "on your website" to help it rank well in the search engines — in other words, the "on the page" factors. In this post we're going to talk about the external factors that...... - Write For People and SEO Search engines can be one of the most important ways for bringing new and free customers to a site. Many people who have never heard of your site will use a search engine to find what they are looking for, at your site or at someone else’s. But unfortunately, a......
-
SEO For Blogs Dateline: SES NY - March 26, 2009 SEO for Blogs Yesterday, Michael Gray, Owner of Atlas Web Service, presented the following hints and tips to improving the SEO value of your blog. 1. Don’t write blog titles that suck Bad titles lack keyword focus, they are often clever or amusing......
Related Websites - 5 Linking Mistakes You Should Avoid Follow the following steps to avoid Link Building mistakes 1. Avoid unnatural links. I remember, in 2006, people were fine with any kind of links as Google didn’t used to give very high weight age to neighborhood and was only concerned about PR but in 2008, things are a lot......
- Search Engine Optimisation Explained In Simple Terms. Search engine optimization - or S.E.O as it is frequently termed - is, in its most basic form, the art of building your site in such a manner that when folk use search engines to search for information related to what your website contains, they'll find you at the top......
-
Principles of Good SEO for Your Blog Regardless of whether you are writing a blog simply because you enjoy having a lot of people reading your thoughts, or if you are writing a blog because you are looking to generate income, one of the most important things that you need to do is maximize the SEO or...... - Build Links, Increase Page Rank, Increase Traffic Search Engines in the last couple of years are giving more weight to one way links with a similar theme, these links are a vote of trust and confidence for your website, they are so important that they help your site in the rankings of search engines. One search engine......
-
11 Tips to Get More Traffic to Your Corporate Blog Now that you have your blog set up, and you're beginning to post your useful and relevant content, you may be wondering why you are not driving incredible amounts of traffic to your site. You are already publishing, and days are going by, so why is no one stopping to......
Comments
2 Comments on Link Building and SEO
-
Lisa - Search Engine Optimization Consulting on
Sun, 4th Apr 2010 2:17 am
-
neil from link building on
Tue, 10th Aug 2010 6:42 am
It all boils down to onen powerful fact, LINKS. The more you have them, the better you rank.:)
Lisa – Search Engine Optimization Consulting´s last blog ..My Sweetest turns 21 
“Inbound links can boost your search result rankings” without question, shame its a time consuming process
neil@link building´s last blog ..Standard Membership Free!
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
Translator
-
-
-
-
Mastermind Group
-
