The Importance of Linking

A link is simply a shortcut to another webpage. Most likely you have gotten to this article by clicking on a link from another web page. Like you, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, as well as countless others, follow links to find new web pages to list in their search results pages. A single link in the correct place could bring many visitors to your site or bring a search engine which will, hopefully, bring many visitors to your site. So linking can be the single greatest investment you make in terms of website advertising or online marketing in general. The key is to make the link valuable.

If you have read our other articles or are working with one of our consultants, you already know the value of having highly relevant content on your website for the sake of both your visitors (aka potential customers) and the search engines. The logical next step is to make sure your links are considered highly relevant from related, news, and/or opinion sites. These links will provide you with human visitors and protect you, to some degree, from changes that the search engine companies make to their formula. If you are getting plenty of targeted human traffic, the search engine will also reward you by listing you higher in the search results. The search engines are always trying to put the highest quality sites at the top of the list. They call these sites authority sites. The more relevant links that point to you, the more they are indicating that your site is an authority site.

Many people try to buy links in bulk from sites that specialize in getting "links for SEO." The problem is that most of these pages have nothing to do with the content of your site and have many other people's links on them as well. So you are just one of many other un-targeted links. You will probably not get much if any human visitors and the search engines will probably give you a little credit for having a link, but it wont help that much. That is why many people believe that if you get enough links the little credit will add up and help move you to the top of the list. This may work for some but what do they do when the search engine decides to change the way they value links? If you had high quality relevant links, that would not be an issue because they would still bring relevant traffic.

For more information, please contact one of our consultants today to get a linking strategy campaign started.