Tag Archives: quality
Link Building – How Important is It?
What is all the fuss about links to your website? Why such a push on link building services? What in the world is link building? In this article I will discuss what link building is, the importance of it and how to incorporate it into your Internet Marketing Plan.
Link building is the process of getting links to your website from other sites, especially high traffic, industry specific sites. Getting links to your web site used to be an easy task, just get as many incoming links to your site as possible, quality and nature or the links was unimportant. Then link relevance came along; search engines now take into account the quality and relevance of your site’s incoming links. This makes the process of link building a much more complicated program. With all of the other tasks that business owners have, link building may not be high on the priority list. It may be best to hire a professional Internet marketing firm to help.
Some concepts to know when embarking on a link building campaign:
Page Rank: is the value that the search engines give to a web page. It is usually on a scale of 1 to 10.
Link Popularity: is the number to links pointing to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines consider your site more important and rank it higher the more “incoming” links that your site has and puts weight on those sites as well.
Building link popularity helps to gain higher page rank for your web site. The higher the page rank, the higher your site will appear on the search engines with competitive keywords. The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN use link popularity to determine how important your site is in order to give it a rank in search results. The more incoming links a site has, the more important or valuable it must be.
In the process of link building, quality is more important than quantity. It is important to choose quality sites to link to yours. Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products. For example, if you sell insurance, a link from an insurance information site would benefit your business more than just a link on a general “catch all” link site.
Probably the most important benefit of having a high number of quality links to your site is the effect it has on the search engine rankings. Most of the major search engines use “link popularity” as a main factor in determining where your site should rank. If your site has a lot of high quality sites linking to it, the search engines will think it is a popular site and give it a high page rank. Building quality and relevant links has two advantages; you gain visitors from the linking site and you also boost your page rank with the search engines.
A complete link building program involves generating links to your site from a variety of sources. This includes directories, social networking sites, blogs, even writing articles and press releases. Directories are one of the most comprehensive ways to generate incoming links. They are designed to promote links and are sometimes fee-based. Social networks and blogs have become a great way to generate incoming links to your web site. It does take patients and skill, however, to utilize blogs and social networks to generate links; it may be best to leave this to a professional SEO company to do for you.
Besides social networks, blogs and directories, article sites are another way to create incoming links to your site. Article sites usually only allow links in the resource box of your articles, not in the text of the article itself. The links generated here are permanent links, unlike directories and blogs where links might be deleted. Article sites rarely delete articles. Article writing also makes you the “expert” on the subject you are writing about, making it more likely that people will want to visit your site. Article submission can be a tedious process, best left to the professional SEO company.
How High Quality Links Can Make a Real Difference to a Search Engine Rank
Once upon a time, it was thought that when a business launched its website, the orders would simply come flooding in. But, with literally billions of websites on the net, sites need more than a catchy domain name and some pretty solid content to be a success. The best way to succeed online is to build a site presence, and links makes all the difference, particular high quality links. When a web user wants to find a website, he or she will usually enter a relevant phrase or topic name into a search engine and search for specific information, not a particular site. Links play a key role in establishing the prominence that a particular site has within a topic, and therefore a higher rank within the search engine. Through search engine optimisation, which is more commonly referred to as SEO, the search engine will best be able to find what the user is looking for. This makes the dual areas of site linking and key word searching equally important. But, in terms of linking, there are aspects that affect the actual quality of the link, one of which is relevance. For many people, the whole world of website linking is a bit like backwards Greek. Completely confusing. However, it is perfectly clear when one breaks the matter down into its simplest form and keeps in mind the key theme word on which the whole matter is based. That theme word is sharing. A link is basically a percentage of a single value, lets say the number 1. And the value of 1 is divided equally between all of the websites on the internet, ensuring that all existing sites have an equal rank. Through links, websites can donate their value to others, thereby building the significance of the website they links to. To make it simpler, think of the internet as an apartment building, with 100 apartments. The building has a value of 100, with each apartment a value of 1. The popularity, and therefore rank of apartments, can be measured by the number of residents that like to visit, or link to, it. So, if three residents visit apartment 5B, they donate their respective values, meaning 5B is worth 3. And since every other apartment is worth just 1, that means that 5B is the most popular or the most prominent, and is duly ranked top of the list. It gets a little more complicated when the resident in apartment 3F likes to visit three apartments regularly, say 7D and 2H, as well as 5B. In that case, 3F simply divides its value into 3, thereby donating 0.33 to each of 7D, 2H and 5B. However, as an intricate visiting pattern develops, the values can become extremely varied and result in a table of preferences, clearly ranking the apartments according to their popularity. Quality is also important, and search engines have developed to such a level of sophistication that they can identify which links are most relevant, and which ones are less so. In the past, owners of websites and blogs simply built a multitude of links on other sites to into a position of significance. The problem was that not all links were on relevant sites, or even sites that could be considered genuine. So, an owner of a pet store might link sites relating to gardening, sport and archeology to his own business website, as well as those relating to pet matters. The result is a huge number of links, but only a small percentage of which are relevant. Now, search engines evaluate the quality of the particular links, that if a site is linked to a site within the same topic or industry, the relevance is high and the link is a high quality link . Once this status has been achieved, and a search engine places a site higher on the ranking system, it will take less time for a web user to find a relevant site. With the right key words, and a truly effective search engine optimisation strategy, more traffic can be directed to a site, bringing more potential customers, creating more business and increasing sales. With the right link building and SEO techniques, any business can thrive on the world wide web.
How High Quality Links Can Make a Real Difference to a Search Engine Rank
Once upon a time, it was thought that when a business launched its website, the orders would simply come flooding in. But, with literally billions of websites on the net, sites need more than a catchy domain name and some pretty solid content to be a success. The best way to succeed online is to build a site presence, and links makes all the difference, particular high quality links. When a web user wants to find a website, he or she will usually enter a relevant phrase or topic name into a search engine and search for specific information, not a particular site. Links play a key role in establishing the prominence that a particular site has within a topic, and therefore a higher rank within the search engine. Through search engine optimisation, which is more commonly referred to as SEO, the search engine will best be able to find what the user is looking for. This makes the dual areas of site linking and key word searching equally important. But, in terms of linking, there are aspects that affect the actual quality of the link, one of which is relevance. For many people, the whole world of website linking is a bit like backwards Greek. Completely confusing. However, it is perfectly clear when one breaks the matter down into its simplest form and keeps in mind the key theme word on which the whole matter is based. That theme word is sharing. A link is basically a percentage of a single value, lets say the number 1. And the value of 1 is divided equally between all of the websites on the internet, ensuring that all existing sites have an equal rank. Through links, websites can donate their value to others, thereby building the significance of the website they links to. To make it simpler, think of the internet as an apartment building, with 100 apartments. The building has a value of 100, with each apartment a value of 1. The popularity, and therefore rank of apartments, can be measured by the number of residents that like to visit, or link to, it. So, if three residents visit apartment 5B, they donate their respective values, meaning 5B is worth 3. And since every other apartment is worth just 1, that means that 5B is the most popular or the most prominent, and is duly ranked top of the list. It gets a little more complicated when the resident in apartment 3F likes to visit three apartments regularly, say 7D and 2H, as well as 5B. In that case, 3F simply divides its value into 3, thereby donating 0.33 to each of 7D, 2H and 5B. However, as an intricate visiting pattern develops, the values can become extremely varied and result in a table of preferences, clearly ranking the apartments according to their popularity. Quality is also important, and search engines have developed to such a level of sophistication that they can identify which links are most relevant, and which ones are less so. In the past, owners of websites and blogs simply built a multitude of links on other sites to into a position of significance. The problem was that not all links were on relevant sites, or even sites that could be considered genuine. So, an owner of a pet store might link sites relating to gardening, sport and archeology to his own business website, as well as those relating to pet matters. The result is a huge number of links, but only a small percentage of which are relevant. Now, search engines evaluate the quality of the particular links, that if a site is linked to a site within the same topic or industry, the relevance is high and the link is a high quality link . Once this status has been achieved, and a search engine places a site higher on the ranking system, it will take less time for a web user to find a relevant site. With the right key words, and a truly effective search engine optimisation strategy, more traffic can be directed to a site, bringing more potential customers, creating more business and increasing sales. With the right link building and SEO techniques, any business can thrive on the world wide web.