Tag Archives: links

The Real Value Of Link Building

The biggest misconception of link building is that it is solely intended to increase your rank within the search engines. The majority of us who use this train of thought would then proceed to get as many links for their site from any sources available, without understanding the real value behind carrying out this time consuming project. Not only do you obtain a large number of irrelevant links that will not benefit you, but you have wasted precious time and missed out on a lot of targeted traffic.

So what is the true value of link building? First and foremost, it should be intended to generate quality traffic for your business. If you keep this thought in mind when carrying out your assignment, then you are most certainly going to obtain relevant links along the way that will help to boost your exposure within the search engines, making it a win / win situation.

A good example would be this article. Once it is submitted to several article directories, people who are searching for information on link building will most likely read this information posted. At the bottom is a link to my site which is based on offering search engine marketing services and link building campaigns. If a reader was interested in finding out more, there is a high chance that they will follow through on my link and read up about my services. In this case, not only have I generated a quality lead, but I have also attained a relevant link from the article directory. If twenty people read my article each day and ten people where to click through to my website, then you can obviously see that the link building has done its job in attracting targeted visitors.

However, if I was to write up an article on the latest mobile phones and provided a link to my website, then there is a very high chance that a reader will not follow through on the link. A search engine works in the same respect. Just like a human visitor, why should it read up on marketing services if it’s currently reading an article on mobile phones? From this a search engine can see that the link was placed for the sole purpose of link building and has no genuine relationship. As a result, no targeted traffic will come through to my site and the link will not benefit me in any way.

At the end of the day it all boils down to the quality of the link. Another good example is: if you were to have two restaurants to choose from and two different people recommending which one to eat at, you are most likely to take the advice of the person who has more authority on the subject of restaurants. In a similar manner, a search engine will follow and count the relevance of a link based on where the link to you is coming from and if there is a common factor between the sites.

The key to developing good linking strategies that will help your site’s performance in the search engines is to ask yourself the following: will my link entice someone to click on it, which in turn generates quality traffic? Answering “yes” and using this methodology when carrying out your task will attract visitors interested in what you have to offer as well as collect you valuable links.

Every now again there are new methods on how to develop a successful link building campaign. At the same time, new loop holes are being found on how to exploit these methods. Eventually it will come to a point where these loop holes cease to exist. So to avoid getting caught up in the confusion, working toward a campaign that is totally focused on generating quality traffic is the best way to ensure that you are not wasting your time and hard earned dollars with attaining pointless links.

The Real Value Of Link Building

The biggest misconception of link building is that it is solely intended to increase your rank within the search engines. The majority of us who use this train of thought would then proceed to get as many links for their site from any sources available, without understanding the real value behind carrying out this time consuming project. Not only do you obtain a large number of irrelevant links that will not benefit you, but you have wasted precious time and missed out on a lot of targeted traffic.

So what is the true value of link building? First and foremost, it should be intended to generate quality traffic for your business. If you keep this thought in mind when carrying out your assignment, then you are most certainly going to obtain relevant links along the way that will help to boost your exposure within the search engines, making it a win / win situation.

A good example would be this article. Once it is submitted to several article directories, people who are searching for information on link building will most likely read this information posted. At the bottom is a link to my site which is based on offering search engine marketing services and link building campaigns. If a reader was interested in finding out more, there is a high chance that they will follow through on my link and read up about my services. In this case, not only have I generated a quality lead, but I have also attained a relevant link from the article directory. If twenty people read my article each day and ten people where to click through to my website, then you can obviously see that the link building has done its job in attracting targeted visitors.

However, if I was to write up an article on the latest mobile phones and provided a link to my website, then there is a very high chance that a reader will not follow through on the link. A search engine works in the same respect. Just like a human visitor, why should it read up on marketing services if it’s currently reading an article on mobile phones? From this a search engine can see that the link was placed for the sole purpose of link building and has no genuine relationship. As a result, no targeted traffic will come through to my site and the link will not benefit me in any way.

At the end of the day it all boils down to the quality of the link. Another good example is: if you were to have two restaurants to choose from and two different people recommending which one to eat at, you are most likely to take the advice of the person who has more authority on the subject of restaurants. In a similar manner, a search engine will follow and count the relevance of a link based on where the link to you is coming from and if there is a common factor between the sites.

The key to developing good linking strategies that will help your site’s performance in the search engines is to ask yourself the following: will my link entice someone to click on it, which in turn generates quality traffic? Answering “yes” and using this methodology when carrying out your task will attract visitors interested in what you have to offer as well as collect you valuable links.

Every now again there are new methods on how to develop a successful link building campaign. At the same time, new loop holes are being found on how to exploit these methods. Eventually it will come to a point where these loop holes cease to exist. So to avoid getting caught up in the confusion, working toward a campaign that is totally focused on generating quality traffic is the best way to ensure that you are not wasting your time and hard earned dollars with attaining pointless links.

Reciprocal link sharing does not work

That might sound a bit dramatic but no, it does not. I’ve been doing some research (during the early hours of the morning) and I’m amazed at the number of websites out there adopting the most insane techniques in order to climb SERPs.

I must admit, I was intrigued by the methods at first. I mean, who wouldn’t like to get a week’s work done in a few minutes? 🙂 But you know what they say, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

The biggest monster of all is the promise of instantaneous link share with thousands of quality websites. This basically involves joining a poorly code shabby directory which is copied many times over thousands of different domains. There’s several things wrong with that:

1. These pages offer no quality content what-so-ever, so they’ll never be highly regarded by SEs.

2. The number of outgoing links on each page means your site will get a minuscule tiny small fraction of absolute nothing – it really isn’t much…

3. The same pages are duplicated over and over again around the web and are promptly ignored and penalized by SEs.

Now, if you’re a SEO expert you will know that apart from being a gross waste of time, it’s extremely unlikely that any of the above will harm your site’s reputation. A webmaster has no control over external links to his website(s), and for that reason his website(s) will not be penalized by the SEs, contrary to popular belief. In fact, these techniques may well fool small search engines* and quickly push a website up the ladder on SERPs.

Having said that, here’s the big whopper….

4. The most common requirement for these link-share wonders is that, of course, you place yet another copy of the directory and its thousands of badly coded content-less pages under your website.

This is a huge problem and is where many people go wrong. And here’s why:

* Adding thousands of pages to your website overnight will dramatically affect your content’s keyword density. SEs like Google don’t only examine an individual page, they also analyse the website as a whole in order to determine its ‘theme’.

* Whereas incoming links cannot harm your websites(s) reputation, outgoing links can destroy it – very quickly. A link to a page is seen seen as a ‘vote of confidence’ to that page and its content from the website linking into it. Linking into bad neighbourhoods and low quality websites will damage your reputation – (ie.: SERPs rankings).

This all sounds very depressing… so what can you do?

The most effect form of link sharing is and will always be one-way incoming links. And the best way to get that is by having quality content. And the best quality content should be found on your website.

Although traditional methods can be time consuming, you simply cannot go wrong. One week of quality content publishing is worth a million times more than every automatic FFA link directory that has ever existed ever.

* Small search engines – Anything other than Google, Yahoo, MSN and the likes…