Relevant links raise
your natural search engine rankings.
Link development is a crucial part of any web
promotion program. Link
popularity is the number of hyperlinks
pointing to your Web site, and it plays an increasingly important
role in search engine rankings.
Any web
promotion program not
including link
development is incomplete. Building incoming
links to your website is the most important thing you can do
to increase your organic search engine rankings.
Link Popularity
From a search engine perspective, your link popularity is based
on the sites linking to your pages. The factors determining link
popularity are the quality of sites linked to yours, the relevance of
those sites to yours and the quality of the link's text.
The major search engines rank websites
primarily on:
- The volume of incoming links to a webpage.
- The quality of the incoming links to a webpage.
- The anchor
text (link text) of the incoming link to your
webpage.
Third-level linking is also used to determine your site's popularity
- in other words, it looks at what sites link to the sites that
link to you.
Generally speaking, quality of links is far more important than
the quantity. This is the search engine's way of circumventing
links page generation scams and link pyramid schemes where other
website owners agree to add your link and you agree to publish
the same links page as them. Avoid these sites! Search engines
look for and find these scams and could penalise
or blacklist your site if you were to be a participant.
How
to best acquire quality links
The
challenge is to achieve a high number of inbound links with
relevant anchor
text. One can hire someone to accomplish the
arduous chore of attaining links (through reciprocal link exchanges)
with a limited prospect of success.
The problems with reciprocal
linking are that it takes significant time investment
and search engines can discount reciprocal links. Search
engines give a higher value to one way links to your website.
A
more effective method of link building is through directory
submissions, linking
to major directories, and purchasing
links from high quality relevant websites who are willing to
sell advertising space. The
text link advertising model has eased the process of attaining
links. This
is where we can help.
Campaign Approach
A linking campaign involves Completecents
researching the web and identifying useful, relevant third-party
sites that are likely to be interested in linking
to your web site.
Once
identified the sites are contacted with the aim
of acquiring the links. While searching
and assessing, Completecents also identifies
other types of partners for your
web site. That
is sites with whom a relationship would be useful
(for example for banner advertising sharing, mailing
list sharing/targeting and co-branding).
Therefore,
when conducting link building, Completecents asks
the following questions:
- How many web sites link to yours?
- How much traffic do they drive?
- How much of that traffic turns to
customers?
- What percentage of your industry's
top websites link to you?
- How many sites link to you without
being asked?
- Is
the site in question relevant or complimentary
to your site? For example, does it contain any
information about the kind of products and services
you offer.
- Does
it relate to or compliment the main topic of
your site?
- Is it aimed at your target audience?
- Does
it have a relevant 'links' page or section in
place already? Sites which already contain links
are far more likely to provide a link than those
that don't.
- Does
it look like the may be useful for other partnership
opportunities? For instance, does the site have
a news section or an email newsletter, or any other
area which may be useful.
- Does
it seem like a site that receives a lot of traffic?
Linking Campaign Benefits
Benefits of a effective strategic link building and partnership
building campaign include:
- More targeted traffic to your web site. Other web sites send
you visitors because they link to you.
- Higher rankings in the search engines. Search engines like
Google, HotBot and AltaVista use "link popularity" (see below)
to rank web sites.
- If your site has a high link popularity, then you'll have
high rankings on the search engines.
- Increased business. Exchanging links with other sites will
build a useful links page for your site visitors, encouraging
them to return.
Contact us today for online marketing advice, information and prices.
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