The Importance of Link Building For Your Website

Hello again

While it’s usually very important to optimise your website for the key phrases your clients use, only part of that optimisation can take place on the website itself.

On site optimisation can also help to make PPC campaigns more cost-effective, but the most important part of search engine optimisation is incoming links from other websites. That means a link building campaign is crucially important for your website if you want people to find it on the first page or two of the search engine results.

Search engines like Google use the number and quality of inbound links to a site as an indication of the authority or value of that site. If lots of other sites link to a particular website, the theory goes, that site must be important or useful.

Also, the value of inbound links depends on the ‘authority’ of the website they come from and whether the links are ‘follow’ or ‘no follow’ links. A lot of websites that seem to offer good back-linking opportunities actually have ‘no follow’ links that don’t really add much ‘link juice’, as it’s known, to your website.

A ‘no follow’ link is one where the search engine spiders are actively instructed by the coding in the link not to follow the link (for example, to your site), so your site doesn’t gain the extra authority that inbound links would give it.

For example, links from YouTube are now mostly ‘no follow’, and most blogs and WordPress-based websites are ‘no follow’ by default.

Many people, even the website and blog owners themselves, aren’t aware of that and might offer to exchange links with you in all good faith. Others will have modified the coding of their website so that links from them are worth getting, and these are the ones you should consider getting links from.

Other good sites for linking are directories, news release and article sharing websites, some video sites, forums, and popular blogs where the links are of the ‘follow’ type. How you add your links will vary with each type of website.

Tracking down these worthwhile sites and building links from them all can be very time-consuming and even tedious, but it’s very important to the wellbeing of your own website.

Finally, remember that the search engines are trying to give human viewers the best possible experience, so to satisfy the search engines your link building strategy needs to look as natural as possible. That means you need to build links steadily and not all at once, and you need to keep building new backlinks to your site throughout its life.

Old links become ‘stale’ or even disappear as the other sites are updated, so an ongoing strategy of continuing link building and refreshment is also needed to keep your site as high in the search engine results as possible.

Roy