In last month’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) feature we answered some very common questions about SEO and the numerous factors that contribute to successful website promotion. This month we will plunge into one of the most important factors in online promotion: back links.

Why is link building so important?

Search engines will use the quantity, and more than ever before, the quality of links pointing to your site to measure the credibility and popularity of your website. If your website is deemed popular, trustworthy and authoritative, it has a greater probability of appearing highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

What’s more, links pointing to your site can pass quality, targeted traffic to your site; provided you have links from related, quality websites.

So what is a ‘quality’ backlink?

In an increasingly sophisticated search engine arena, it is becoming more and more important to acquire quality links from sites Google classifies as reputable about a particular topic. When seeking links the following factors should be considered:

• The thematic relevance of the linking page and website
• The number of outgoing links on that linking page
• The page rank of the linking page
• The key terms in the anchor text linking back to your page
• The key terms surrounding the anchor text linking back to your page

But how can you go about getting them?

How can I build back links to my website?

Backlinks can be built in various ways:

Quality Content

The main aim for the search engines is to rank the most relevant content highly in their results. So, by giving the search engines keyword-rich, great content, you’re already bringing them to your doorstep – you’re feeding the search engines with information, which they can use to rank your site appropriately in the SERPs.

Of course, great content on a website also attracts great links! By regularly adding helpful articles, news, reviews etc. it not only contributes to the optimisation of your site, it also attracts links that the search engines will consistently reward.

Articles & Press Releases

To follow on from the strategy above, the current state of the web means that many websites have to undertake their own strategies to expose their content and generate links back to their site.

By writing articles and press releases, and allowing them to be freely published in exchange for a back link, good content has the potential to be re-published multiple times; each time creating another back link to your website.

The main advantage of this technique is that articles are likely to appear on closely related sites; one of the main factors search engines examine when measuring the value of your back links.

Link Bait

Creating a document, tool, widget or service that is novel and truly useful to your target audience is a fantastic strategy for building backlinks to your site.

Surveys, competitions, top 10 lists and tools, along the same lines of mortgage calculators are examples of such link bait that can form a constant stream of long-standing backlinks.

Competitor Analysis

It is also a good idea to look at the links obtained by your competitors. If you can pursue methods of your own to get a link back to your own site from these sites, you can then work on exceeding your competitor's links.

Directories

Acquiring inclusion in online directories can provide a very valuable “reference” or “testimonial” for your site. From an SEO viewpoint a link from a human edited and established directory is of great value, in comparison to the lesser established ones. A couple of examples of more established directories include: The Yahoo Directory & Business.com.

Community Interaction

There are so many social interaction sites across the web today, and there popularity continues to grow rapidly. Such sites, like online forums, blogs and social networking sites are usually closely themed, and they enable anyone to contribute. By contributing to a community, whether it is giving your opinion, advice or answering questions, it can help to build up your reputation as an expert in your field. In building up a reputation, it not only portrays your company as an expert in your industry, your contributions can create backlinks. Forum signatures, Blog comments, Google Groups and similar sites activate signature links (links from your name, to the website of your choice). There’s debate as to whether or not the search engines take such links into account when ranking pages, but there’s no doubt that such links will refer targeted traffic.

Alternatively, developing a gathering point, in the form of a blog or forum, on your own website can be a goldmine for incoming links. If frequently updated with industry-related content, it is possible to attract quite a following where people interact with one another. While it’s no easy task at the beginning, once established, your gathering point is sure to be a hub for incoming links from other bloggers.

Reciprocal Backlinks

Linking between sites is what makes the web such an interactive place.

However, reciprocal linking (“You link to me and I’ll link to you”) campaigns have been widely debated for years, as to whether or not they can harm a site or actually have a positive effect.

In our experience, reciprocal linking with a moderate number of on-topic sites, that are genuinely helpful to your visitors, cannot do any harm. However, linking with large numbers of off-topic sites is not recommended, nor is being a part of automated reciprocal link programs. These could be seen by the search engines as dubious strategies.

Paid Backlinks

Back links that are paid for is another widely debated SEO strategy.

In recent times, most notably last October (2007), the paid link debate was somewhat intensified when Google penalised websites involved in paid links.

The argument that search engines present is that paid links represent manipulation and is therefore against their quality guidelines: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.” - Google's Quality Guidelines.

Search engines use links to help determine reputation because links are usually editorial votes given by choice. Selling links flaws this model making it harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted.

On the other side of the argument, some webmasters believe paying for a link that will provide a reasonable amount of targeted traffic or build buzz should not be viewed any differently to general marketing – like paying for an advert in a magazine for example.

If a website wants to purchase links purely for visitors and traffic, not to influence page rank, the search engines suggest using the rel="nofollow" attribute. Using nofollow "is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine." - Matt Cutts, Head of Google's Webspam team.

In Summary

In summary all link-building strategies can be time consuming.

In the past natural link building involved developing the most useful content. By offering your targeted audience the best possible resources, you could gain natural and relevant links through others on the web linking to you.

Unfortunately, the current state of the web means most websites have to undertake their own strategies to expose their content and generate links back to their site. Building up valuable content is challenging and getting content exposed can be even more challenging, but with the web growing at such as rapid rate, and search becoming a lot more sophisticated, the long term benefits are worth it.

If you are interested in finding out more about Sayu's link building services, call us today on 0845 634 8283.