Most people think of Google as a very mysterious entity. To some extent it is, but while the online search giant does hold many cards tightly to its chest, they do also give website owners vital clues as to what they can do to improve their search results and what criteria is generally used to rank websites.

One of the major criteria that Google measures to judge a website’s worthiness of a first page Google result is link popularity. Link popularity is a part of Google’s search algorithm that measures the importance of your website from how many high quality and relevant websites link back to yours. While quality content and other factors remain important as well, Link Building is an important part of search engine optimisation to be included in any good SEO strategy and has so for a number of years.

Google Page Rank

Most websites that Google has crawled and indexed in its search engine are assigned what it calls a Page Rank. A Google Page Rank gives each page of a website a score out of 10. According to Google’s technical overview page, “PageRank… considers the importance of each page that casts a vote (link), as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. ” The higher the PR, the greater the chance of being pushed up in Google search results pages (SERPs). A carefully managed link campaign can significantly boost your position on the search engines and the subsequent referring traffic from both linking websites and the search engines themselves.

The Art of Link Building

The object of link building therefore is to get links to your website, but what kinds of websites should you get links from? If you were to get instant links from thousands of websites that have nothing to do with your business is a big waste of time and effort. Websites should be carefully considered on a basis of relevance. Although there are literally thousands of known and unknown criteria that Google takes into account when analysing links to your website, AWD SEO consultants recommend considering the following basic criteria:

• The domain name and linking page URL of the linking website. If there are relevant keywords in the domain name or the URL, this is very valuable.
• The text of the link back to your website.
• Any descriptive text immediately following your link text
• The position of the link on the website.
• The relevance of the content of the linking website to yours.
• The Page Rank of the linking website

Reciprocal Links

An effective way to get quality websites with relevant content to link back to yours is to offer reciprocal links. This can be achieved by having a page on your website with a list of “useful links”, presumably for your visitors for find other interesting websites that are related to your website’s industry or topic. Swapping links gives both parties link value, making it fairly easy to convince another website owner to link back to you.

One-Way Links and Paid Links

For those that do not want to have a publicly viewable link partner page or pages on their website, the link building process is restricted to one-way links. One way links can be valuable to your Google PR, but again it depends on where they are coming from. Free business and website directories can be a good opportunity for one-way links as long as they are reputable and have good standing with the search engines. Posting on forums and commenting on blogs can be a useful way to build one-way links too. To really compete and get the best quality links without linking back however is to pay for links. Many website directories and other websites make an income from placing links on their website knowing that their website is popular and relevant with flow on effects to the websites that it links to. Many directories offer paid “featured” business listings or one-way links, for example, that place your link more prominently than free or reciprocal links.

When Is A Link Not A Link?

A lot of websites offer link exchange or one way links that seem like a valuable opportunity to increase your link popularity when in fact they are useless for this purpose. There are two ways that these useless link types can be recognised

1. Checking the properties of the link shows a “rel=nofollow” tag – This means that search engine crawlers are told not to follow the link to its destination and significantly diminishes the value of that link. If you hover over the link in your browser it looks like a clear link to your website.

2. The link does not link straight to your website, but is a redirect - These links contain the linking website’s own URL in the link (e.g. http://www.linking-site.net/business/do_link/31273079?url=http://www.awebd.com.au) While this does link to the correct web page but won’t be counted by the search engines towards your link popularity.

3. The website is an automated link farm – Google hates automated link farms. Google prefers, and will place higher value on human edited directories and other websites as far as the production of links is concerned. At least then there is a sense of genuine recommendation involved in having the link placed on a website.

AWD’s SEO consultants recommend avoiding any attempt to gain links from websites that use these types of links on their pages will save frustration. Any money spent on these types of links is assuredly a total waste unless the resulting referral traffic is somehow justified.

Effective Link Building

As important as link building is to any effective SEO strategy, it certainly isn’t something most website owners want to do personally. It certainly isn’t an exciting activity for entrepreneurs that have more immediate concerns to deal with on a day to day basis. Yet link building should be carried out on regular, consistent basis to yield long term SEO results. Trust is also required of whoever is responsible for your link building campaign to ensure that your SEO budget is being handled properly and effectively.

AWD provide link partner analysis expertise to get you the best value links to your website, build your Google PR and increase your traffic through improved search engine results.

Click here to find out more about our SEO services

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About the Author:
AWD are Business IT Consultants providing IT support and security, web design, web development, business telephones and Internet marketing services in Melbourne, Australia.Contact:  1300 855 651
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