SEO and Link Building

What are SEO and Link Building?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a vital part of marketing any business and is the art and science of getting your website listed at the top of search engines like Google when your potential customers search for terms relevant to your business.

A significant element of any good SEO campaign should be link building. This is the generation of links from third-party websites to your own. Each link from another website to yours is in effect a “vote of confidence” from that site and Google (and other engines) will analyse all of the links that they can find pointing to your website when they determine how you rank for any given search term. The more (good) links your website has the higher it will be on Google.

It is important therefore to build lots of links from a diverse variety of sources. It is true that some links are more valuable and useful than others, and this is governed by two factors which are relevance and authority.

Relevance is how the topic of the linking page (and website as a whole) relates to the topic of the page that it is linking to.

Authority is how important the individual page (and website as a whole) are considered by Google regardless of its relevance to any particular topic.

What is the best way to create links?

There are many ways to create links to your site but it is sad to say that most of the links on the web are not “optimised”.

The most common mistakes are when authors create a link on words like “click here” or “read more”. If you take each of the links present on any page out of context, it is not possible to determine where you are going to land or what you’d expect to see if you clicked on such a link. Instead if the link is placed on a relevant group of keywords then this clearly describes to the user what they will get when they click.

Whatsmore, links like the “good” example above fit much better into the narrative of the page and do not disrupt the visitors reading. Because they seem natural and “in-place” they are more likely to be clicked upon and also will be considered of greater value by search engines.