When search engines visit your website and analyse each page, they use a combination of over 200 signals and metrics to determine:
1) What the page is about and 2) The importance of the page.
The number and quality of inbound links from external websites pointing to any particular page plays a massive factor in its ability to rank (see my blog post on “the SEO ranking factors for 2011″).
Consider each link to your website a vote of confidence from the website owner. Just like in real life, the more votes of confidence you have the better. Also, the more influential the voters (people or websites!) the more power each of these votes carries with it.
A good website with excellent content should attract links naturally, and these links will occur on a regular basis and come from a wide variety of sources. Link Building assists your websites natural link profile and matches its behavior by adding a constant stream of new links.
It is a fact that some websites disappear, and that the content on the web changes fairly frequently. Because of this, links that you once had pointing to your site may disappear or their relavance or authority might change, for better or for worse. This is why it is important to continually build new links and to improve your trust, relevance and authority scores.
Lets also not forget that links will bring you traffic from these websites, not just positive signals for search engines. The web is built upon links, and effective link building and SEO is about finding ways to get high quality, relevant traffic to your website.
Google assigns all pages of every website it views a “Pagerank” (see my blog post explaining “What is Pagerank?”). It uses this score (and other signals) to determine the importance of your page, and also the importance of each of the links that point towards it.
If you have 100 links pointing to a page but all of these links are from very low quality or even ungraded pages then it might be more effective to achieve just one or two links from a highly authoritative source.
Having links from websites related to your industry is better than generic links with no natural relationship, however ensuring a balanced mixture of diverse sources is also important.
When a link is made, the text used for that link (called “Anchor Text”) plays an important role in describing what it is the user will get if they click on it. Making sure that this anchor text is relevant to your web page (rather than just saying “click here” for example) is critical to the success of good link building activity (see my blog post explaining SEO and Link Building).
Link Building usually forms the largest part of our ongoing monthly search engine optimisation packages. We will look at your existing link profile and create a plan including the following:
- Monthly submission to quality business directories
- Registration of essential web profiles
- High quality targetted and relevant links
- Permanent links with high authority
- Assessment and acquisition of your competitors links
- Contextual and relevant links to bring real traffic
as well as positive SEO ranking signals
Using the tools and knowledge that we have learned, refined and tested, we can build a constant stream of new links to your website which will improve your search engine ranking and will bring more traffic to your website.
If your competitors are ranking above you in the search engine results, it is probably because they have a stronger and more effective link profile.
Contact us today for a review of your existing link profile and to begin an effective link building campaign.