Online Linking Impacts Online Search Engine Results

Link Building Services

Building inbound links through reciprocal link exchanges can increase traffic and improve a site's visibility in search engines by boosting link popularity. Link popularity measures how many other sites hyperlink to yours, a criterion in search engine ranking results. Quality and reputation of linking sites is a factor: a link from the "New York Times" scores higher than a link from a personal Web page.

The main criteria used to determine which Web sites get ranked the highest involves something called backward links. Simply defined, a backward link occurs when another Web site links to your site. The more backward links you have for a given keyword, the higher your page or site will be ranked when people search for that keyword.

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).

In many cases, link building activity will be more effective if you also offer reciprocal links - that is you offer to add a link to another web site if it links to your site.

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 reciprocal links with other sites will build a useful links page for your site visitors, encouraging them to return.

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.

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.

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?

If you would like us to design and implement an online linking campaign, click here for more information.