SEO Link Building - Search Engine Optimisation and website Link Building
In the simplest of terms, a Search Engine sees a link from another website to your website as being like a vote of confidence in your website...
Search Engines believe that when other websites are linking to your web pages, you must have something good to link to and they will rate your page being linked to more positively.
SEO consultants are experts in link building, Search Engine robots or "spiders" (think of them as micro-browsers) continuously travel virally from web site to web site following links like an enormous daisy chain; in fact Search Engines initially discover your web site via a link from another web site. When it comes to link building you need to remember that a Search Engine’s prime function is to deliver highly relevant results, not some mysterious pharmaceutical products when you are searching for those “hand made chocolates from Brazil”.
Search Engines today take into consideration several additional factors other than just the number of links when rating Inbound Links to your site: the reputation or “Trust” value of sites linking to your website the Theme or Relevance of sites linking to you the “Anchor Text” (the words that the link is embedded behind) in links to your site Once your web site has been found, each page of your site is then ranked by Search Engines based on a complex set of criteria known as an "algorithm" a piece of computer code that takes into consideration on-site and off-site factors collected by the robots or spiders. Data is then assembled, collated and evaluated in order to come up with a Page Score or Rank. This is how a search engine determines which sites to present when someone types in “best digital camera” or “New York hotel near Wall Street”.
All things being equal, when two web sites have similar structure and content, the site with the best links will be served up first. Note that we wrote “best links” not “most links”. Some time ago, a site with the “most links” would have won out, however, today the focus is on relevance, quality and trust. Search Engines may be blind to images, they are not blind to webmasters manipulating their algorithms. They are continuously fine tuning their spiders to exclude web sites that attempt to “fudge” a Search Engine’s results.
Here at Search Engine Optimisation Need, we have developed over the years a proprietary database of over 7,000 web sites, across a wide range of subjects and industries. Based on our relationship and the trust we have built up with each webmaster, each site is happy to link to the trusted, on-theme and relevant web sites of our clients using recommended anchor text. A relevant subset of this database forms the core of an Inbound Link Building campaign.
An SEO Consultant then adds to this core through researching your market and identifying web sites from your suppliers, industry associations, local businesses and trusted on-theme reference sites that are likely to be open to linking to your web site. We prefer to develop one-way Inbound Links but exchanging links with highly relevant and trusted websites may also form a small part of the plan.
SEOneed web Consultants then hand submit to these sources via our contacts in a highly personal way, often by a quick phone call, providing link details, site description and preferred anchor text.
Adding links requires persistence and patience and you just can’t hurry along the Search Engines’ recognition of these links. Also, adding too many links too quickly can result in a Search Engine ignoring the links and even penalising your web site and dropping it from their index. There is no link building “quick fix” and anyone who promises to achieve “a page one listing for high volume keywords in a month for $49.95 through adding 1000 links” to your web site is a liar and you are taking on a substantial risk.
Yes, short term results can be achieved through certain “black hat” Inbound Link building techniques and we have seen them all…but the risk of having your web site banned from Google, Yahoo or Bing, is just too great. The Search Engines employ some of the smartest software engineers on the planet and they are light years ahead of anything you or we could think up to fool them.
Remember, the search engines want link building to be hard as it is a cricial part of their quality assessment of your website so...if someone offers you a link building offer that sounds too good to be true, it probably is...we know how hard genuine link building really is.
We usually suggest that an Inbound Link building campaign be undertaken across a three to six month period, adding between 100 and 300 links per month depending on the scale of the web site. Our fees start from $1000 per month and depend on the theme and competition for links in your specific market segment.
