The Importance of Links – Develop a Proper Link Building Campaign

The Importance of Links to Search Engines

Links to your website are very important to search engines as they display a relative importance of the worth and authority of your website. These links, also known as backlinks, are like a political vote for your website. Some votes hold more weight than others, whether it be politics or search engines. The perceived authority of the site linking to your website is especially important.

In the history of linking and how all search engines saw links, reciprocal links were the way to go. Website owners created web pages and mini directories for reciprocal link sharing. This once worked in helping your site gain page rank. Then link farms and automation of reciprocal links came along and Google took action to punish these sort of black hat tactics. Then came “relevant links”. Search engines set off to determine the relevancy of links from one site to another. This is still viable and in use by Google and others today, but of course this can be abused as well.

It seems that one way inbound links to a website from a website with higher PR are more important than ever. Links from high page rank sites lend much more authority to your website than many other techniques. So, getting these types of links is important and difficult too. Most high page rank sites did not get that ranking with unscrupulous tactics, and rest assured that a webmaster or SEO manager with a high PR site would do nothing to diminish their rankings by selling backlinks. Google’s algorithms would not “slap” but probably punch the lights out on that site’s ranking. Google has plainly stated that they will penalize sites for buying links, and they will often do the same to services that sell these links too. If someone built a museum exhibiting web technology and search engine artifacts, links farms would be one of the more interesting attractions there. Why, because most search engines look at where links come from and go to as well as the number of links. SEO experts state that you should never have more than 100 outgoing links on any one page. This number could be considered high, but if you have a large, popular, higher PR site, it is probably okay. The lesser the number of outbound links from your page, the better. If you are just starting out a link building campaign, look to keep your outbound links per page to twenty five or even less. You also do not want to manually add a link to your site on any webpage that has more than 25 outbound links as well. Check the number of outbound links on any website than you plan to reciprocate with or add a oneway link to. If Google sees your weblink on a page with 50, 100 or even more outbound links, you can get “slapped” by Google, as the industry experts have cleverly monikered.

So how do you get these important links without ruining your progress to higher PR?

• Create great content.
• Share information and become an authoratative resource on a subject.
• Ensure your site is indexed by the major search engines
• Use the webmaster tools that Google, Bing & Yahoo give you for free.
• Develop and regularly update your sitemaps and submit to the search engines.
• Participate in public forums, websites and organizations that are relevant to your site and theme.
• Be unique or even controversial in your articles, stories and content.
• Slowly and surely build content with embedded keywords into your anchor text.
• Use online videos and podcasting to increase your online presence

These are just a few examples of some important things you can do in developing your own search engine management campaign. The search engines are not static in their operation. Search engine strategy could be compared to warfare. Throughout history, when one enemy created a new weapon or tactic, someone else would look to develop a countermeasure to that weapon. Examples of this would be radar and radar jamming equipment, tanks and anti tank weapons. Think about and study everything you can on how the major search engines operate. The main purpose of the Google search engine (and others) is to provide surfers with the most relevant content to the querie input. Learn how these engines work, so that you can grow your presence and avoid being caught up in blackhat SEO scams and having Google put your website light years away from any prospective traffic.