SEO: The importance of links.

Inbound links are like votes of confidense for your website.  Google sees another site linking to yours and it says to itself this site must be respected a little bit.  Then he (Google) finds other sites and adds to that vote count.  When google finds relevant links (links from sites of a similar subject) these are counted as even bigger votes of confidence.

LINK 2 ME & I’ll LINK 2 YOU

High quality backlinks are essential beyond measure to SEO success.  But obtaining them is another matter.  The content of your website and its optimization is well within your own control, but backlinks require the cooperation of others in order to gain successful SEO advantage.  Of course, it’s possible to negotiate improved links from another Webmaster, but that’s not quite as good as controlling the link yourself.

Natural Linking
Google’s logic is, if a page is any good, other people will want to link to it.  These are called backlinks and they have an effect on a website’s PageRank.  Google logically deduces that the more backlinks a website has, the better your website must be.

Of course, in reality, it rarely works like this.  No matter how good your content, you simply can’t rely on other people linking to you off their own back.   Naturally, if your content is excellent and highly topical, you are more likely to get lots of quality backlinks, including from sites that might be categorised alongside your own, and these might offer better value backlinks, particularly if they use keywords with the text anchored for a hyperlink to your website.

However, relying on others to link to your site might not be enough to promote your site.  You may need to take matters into your own hands and find other ways to acquire backlinks.

Creating Backlinks
You may find that lots of people provide backlinks to your website.  However, additional backlinks can never hurt.  Building links is never time poorly spent because it all goes towards your PageRank.

The most commonly used ways of creating your own backlinks are by getting them listed in website directories, posting them in blogs, online forums and article directories.  Other ways include a site owner linking their own sites together.  This is considered an unacceptable way of linking.  Buying bulk links, linking to link farms or link sites and linking to spam or illegal content is also a way to damage your relationship to Google’s search spiders.

The first place to explore for creating good backlinks is a BackLink Building tool.  When you select particular keywords, this tool provides you with a list of websites where you can post messages, notes, articles or just a backlink to your site.   When you have built up a list of great potential backlink sites, you need to visit the sites and post your content with an accurate backlink to your website within it.

You may be asking yourself – why those sites would want to encourage you to post on their space? They need content like you need content. When you post messages or submit content, you do not receive payment. Instead, you provide them with totally free content and they provide you with something in return – a great backlink.  It’s a free trade that will benefit you greatly, but take care to only post to reputable sites.

Forums Directories
Search Engines rummage through forums and index them effectively.  This means that posting on a forum or a respected blog offers valuable backlink resources.  Take care because site editors can edit or remove your postings, so read their submission policy carefully to avoid wasted time.  Blog and forum owners can ban search engines from indexing their site.  Also, some websites do not allow any URLS in their postings, so again, watch out for their rules and regulations.

Article Directories
Article posting usually takes much more time than writing short posts on different websites.  However, articles are very valuable as they promote human as well as search engine interest in your site.  Choose high quality article directories to receive the best results.

Directory Listings
If you need some serious help with web presence, directories such as those available freely at Yahoo and sites like DMOZ can get you noticed by search engines, human visitors and provide you with top quality backlinks.  This type of service usually costs nothing, but it may take a long time before you get your link accepted.

Content Exchange
If you can offer other sites a free feed from your own site, you can get quality backlinks that way.  As soon as the other site publishes your RSS feed, you get a backlink and an open door to more visitors.

Affiliate Programs
These are a great way of encouraging more human visitors to the site.   You offer the potential affiliate a commission for each visitor or buyer, so this can be very costly.  But if you already have an affiliate program, why not use it to create links.

The News!
This is an unusual way to create backlinks, but try it if you want some great results, as long as you use it appropriately.   There are websites that charge (some are free) to publish press releases or news.

A well-written Press Release will potentially bag you many, many visitors and a backlink that comes from a respectable site boosts your SEO value.  The problem tends to be that a Press Release really has to be newsworthy, otherwise, it‘s just an advert masking as news.  News isn’t the easy way to build backlinks, but it is a successful way.

What NOT to DO when Creating Backlinks
Link exchange is something that should generally be avoided like the disease it is.  Many people barter and exchange links, but you need to think this through.  Your ratio of inbound and outbound links is important.   If you have far more outbound links that inbound links, you’re in trouble.  More importantly, if your link buddies are link farms, you run the risk of becoming banned from search engines altogether.  And it does really happen.

Any dodgy or even potentially unscrupulous site should be avoided at all costs.  Whilst Search Engines can’t blame you if link farms link to you, if you are connected to these bad neighbourhoods as they are often called, and you have active links to their sites, your SEO can be squashed.  Build your links slowly and over time in order to avoid looking dodgy yourself.

Read more about Search Engine Optimisation in my forthcoming Book or on my website SEO Resources

Date: 21/09/2008
Category: BUSINESS EDITORIAL