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Building links to your website is a critical step in getting it found by the right people. You might think links are important because people can click on them and come to your site. That is certainly true. But they can also be extremely valuable, even if nobody follows them. Because search engines use the number and quality of incoming links to determine your website’s importance in their ranking algorithm, link-building can be an important strategy in building your business revenue for the long term. As your site moves up the search ranks for search terms that are valuable to your business, you’ll enhance your ability to attract your most-desired visitors to your website.
Why & How Links Matter
A search engine’s ranking algorithm – the mysterious calculations used by Google, Yahoo & Bing to list websites in ranked order — is a dynamic beast, extremely complex and changing all the time. While some people attempt to manipulate or “trick” the search engines into boosting their website’s ranking, it has become increasingly difficult to do this because Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have gotten very skilled at detecting such manipulations and will nearly always catch up with you. The result of such behavior can be a “demotion” in rankings or, if serious enough, can be cause for de-listing a website altogether. A much better strategy is to respect what the search engines are trying to accomplish, and to feed them what they want to know. Here are the three primary questions a search engine is trying to answer when it indexes and ranks your website:
1) What is this website/webpage about?
2) How much authority does this page contain on the topic it’s about?
3) How closely does it match the search term entered by a particular searcher?
The practice of search engine optimization is all about helping the search engines to answer these questions. And link building is all about question #2 – the authority of your page.
Let’s start by defining authority. Much like human authority, a webpage’s authority is determined by how much “respect” it gets from other websites – as measured by the links that point to it. The quality and quantity of links coming into your website have a major impact on how well you’ll do in organic search rankings. This principle should be the starting point for your link-building strategy. The higher your website’s authority, the higher a search engine will place it in the list of search results (all else being equal). Each link coming into your website from another site is a “vote” for your credibility, and therefore your authority . If your link comes from another site with high authority, that counts even more in your favor, just like an article about your company in the New York Times would carry authority in the world of traditional media.
Attracting Links
If you build it (your website), will they come? In a word, no. It’s tempting to think, after all the work required to design and build a great website, and to optimize your pages for the keywords your target audience will be searching for, then naturally searchers will find you and other, related sites will link to you. But the reality is, you need to jump-start that process by deliberately finding and attracting the links that will bring you the link juice and authority you deserve.
Source: Sound Web Solutions
The picture says it all – building links to your website is a process that goes like this:
1) Identify the websites that will bring the most authority and traffic to your site. Find a variety of targets that include a mix of bloggers, directories, social networking, video sites, reviews, .gov or .edu sites, etc. The greater the diversity of link sources, the more credibility you’ll build.
2) Create content that the target sites will value. Get to know your target sites and understand what their readers will find valuable. Whether it’s information, discussion, entertainment, or other “objects” like tools or coupons, offer something unique that they’ll want to share with their readers.
3) Make sure that your offered content contains a link back to the optimized page on your website, and that the link’s anchor text contains the keyword you want to rank for.
4) Also make sure your website, when someone follows that link, has clear and strong calls to action (contact us, sign up for a demo, etc) and that it contains tracking scripts so you know who visited, from where, and what they did when they came to your site. This will allow you to measure the success and ROI of your efforts.
5) The results, over time (and you must give link-building time to work), will be improvements in your search rankings, an increase in the traffic to your site, and enhancements to your online presence and branding. If you’ve designed your website well, it will also bring you increased sales and revenues to your business.
