You may hear within the Search Industry that links are so important when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, is this a myth or is it in fact true? Well let me explain about the types of linking and there benefits.

What is “linking” when it comes to search engine optimisation?

Well as we have mentioned before within our articles that SEO is not about one single factor, link building is just part of the bigger picture & overall process. As we all know within the Search Industry, many people have very different views and techniques, and indeed why not as the people that decide rankings are the search engines, all of us as professionals can only build our programmes based around what we think is ethical and will ultimately increase the amount of traffic to a website, as this is surely the ultimate goal of optimising a webpage. It is believed which ever way you look at it, when you have more links pointing at your site, effectively each link is counted as a vote, the more relevant links you have, the more votes you get, and therefore the search engines should recognise that you have and are building authority across the web surrounding the topic or subject within your website.

Let me start of by saying what not to do! If you take a look around you will see advertisers stating that you can have thousands of links for pennies, and your site will be catapulted into the top rankings, well what do I think about this? Its rubbish basically, if Search Engine Optimisation was that simple of course every man and his dog would be doing this, and the internet would be full of useless sites, so why should you not use such techniques, well its simple, these techniques are also known as using link farms, basically they are third parties who put 1000’s of links to your site, the issue is the links are of poor quality and have no relevance, in fact this will make the situation worse for your rankings as the engines will notice that you have suddenly gained 1000’s of links and run the chance of being sandboxed or banned. You are better with 1 quality link than a 1000 links of poor quality.

What is Reciprocal Linking? Well this basically known as a link exchange, you look at a website that is a similar industry as yours, they put a link on your website and you put a link on yours, the benefit being that the link has some relevance and will increase traffic to both of your sites, regardless of if the search engines link the link or not, it is more likely to like the link as it has some relevance.

The best way to approach linking is to invest time or money (or both) into a steady programme of link building, linking is all about vertical markets, identifying websites within your industry that have some relevance and either exchanging a link, or just having a one way link, this means the other website owner is prepared to put your link on there website as it is of relevance or benefit (or both). It is not a quick or easy process, but over time you will see the benefit of building gradual but relevant links pointing to your website, the anchor text should also be relevant, this is the text that is displayed inform of the link, as it shows a very brief description or title of the link which is what users see before they click on the link and are redirected to your website.

SEO is a complex process, as I have mentioned before, you should not look at SEO from a perspective of what can you do to get me to the top of Google, you should approach SEO and look at all areas that can have an impact on your website, many of these areas can be found in other blogs we have posted.

I will mention a little about linking & social networking sites to give you a taster of what can be achieved, a blog is a great way for you to write really niche and specific industry articles and post them on your website, by doing this you want to achieve interest, by achieving such interest you may well naturally create links back to your site from other webmasters who find your articles of interest and post a link to them, this is a very brief explanation!

If you would like to know more regarding SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or Specialist Link building we are happy to help, just complete our Contact Page.

SEOConsult.co.uk is a specialist Search Engine Optimisation agency who uses ethical techniques to increase traffic to your website.

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