When it comes to achieving results out of your SEO efforts, link building is one of the most potent weapons in your armoury.The SEO effort split generally follows the 30/70 rule, with 30 % of results coming from On-Page optimization and the rest from quality (read genuine) backlinks and social media optimization. Most of the people are mislead into thinking that all that is required is to stuff a huge list of keywords in your HTML text and include some meta tags and voila.. your website is SEO friendly and deserves to be listed on the first page of SERPs. Though there are some sites which manage to appear on the first pages of SERP with just Onpage optimization, its seldom the case with increased competition. SEO ranking is all about beating your competition and how optimized your content is to win the game.
Links and Page Rank
As the purview of SEO expanded and online search market moved from traditional directory listings to more sophisticated search algoritms and robots(courtesy- google), the prominence of backlinks rose in ascertaining the credibility and ranking of pages.The number of external links pointing to the website (inbound links) and the quality of these link sources directly influenced SEO rankings. Google devised a ranking system for each of the webpages based on its patented ranking algorithm named Page Rank (named after one of its founders -Larry Page) and this rank had a direct correlation to content quality of the page.
The page rank was ideally an index ranging between 1-10, but was internally represented by a logarithmic index and the segmentation between 1 to 10 was done on a log scale.This naturally implies that it gets tougher to increase the page rank beyond a point since a page ranked at 6 cannot be considered to be twice better than a page ranked at 3. The actual differnce in quality between these pages internally may be a humungous number.
Why is link building such a vital part of the SEO strategy ?
Inbound Links from external pages in the real sense signifies the relevancy of content and highlights its read-worthiness. As a matter of fact, these links could be considered as a token of recommendation and hence more the number of inbound links, the merrier it is from the perspective of the credibility of the site and more credible the site, higher its ranking with respect to the search engines.
A quality inbound link is an effective qualifier for trustworthiness of the site, but as with any other mechanisms, people have found unethical ways to source inbound links, thus abusing the system in an effort to getting ranked high in SEO results. Some of such tactics that have been employed by webmasters and SEO practitioners are reciprocal linking, link exchanges, creation of multiple sites that ideally serve no real purpose and using these sites to create multiple inbound links to the main site. A number of small businesses were built around the revenue model of buying and selling of such fraudulent links and were able to make a lot of money with the new found linking formula.
As search robots and engines get more intelligent by the day, they have been able to track non-conformances and penalize such sly practices. Google engineers have been working diligently over the past few years to detect and curtail these black hat tactics and recently came out with the Penguin update by which they have been able to downgrade the ranking of websites involved in unnatural linking schemes. Google has particularly been very critical of these violations and has also penalized many of such erring sites by de-indexing them from their search database. The old link building tricks have started to lose their sheen but the search engines have a long way to go as people devise new ways to acquire and provide "natural appearing" links.
Link building - Best Practices
Earning genuine and quality links involves a lot of hardwork and some of the below practices help enhance the effectiveness of these links.
1. Since the search engines consider the page ranking/credibility of the link source, links from educational, news and govt related sites are regarded highly and such inbound links invariably boost search rankings.
2. It is generally easier to get links from sites directly under your control. For example, you could request a backlink from your vendors, suppliers as they probably know more about your products/services and would be inclined to include a back link than somebody with whom you dont have an existing relationship.
3. Try to improve the quality of the page content and get genuine links instead of contrived ones. The hard work and money spent on securing these fabricated links dont serve the purpose and is not worth the effort.
4.When getting links from external sites, pay special attention to the position of the links in the site. A link from a text region is considered more valuable than one that originates from a list of links.
5. Search engines can easily identify reciprocal links and such links dont add any real value for SEO.
6. A textual link works better than an image link as the search engines can decipher text content with ease.
7. Always include relevant keywords as anchor text within your links.
8. When making use of image links, make use of the alt attribute to include keywords.
9. Static text links serve the purpose better than dynamically generated ones (created on the fly using client side scripting)
10. Make use of internal links within the individual pages of the site using long tail keywords as these enable linking between in-site pages and also help in robot navigation and indexing.
11. Stay away from buying links as these wont help in the long term and also you run a risk of being detected and penalized by search engines when tracked. Just remember that the search robots are real smart and are on the job every day.
Undoubtedly, linking is one of the most effective strategies for improving your SEO ranking and a "right link" at the "right place" helps get the right SEO results.
Happy Link building !!
Links and Page Rank
As the purview of SEO expanded and online search market moved from traditional directory listings to more sophisticated search algoritms and robots(courtesy- google), the prominence of backlinks rose in ascertaining the credibility and ranking of pages.The number of external links pointing to the website (inbound links) and the quality of these link sources directly influenced SEO rankings. Google devised a ranking system for each of the webpages based on its patented ranking algorithm named Page Rank (named after one of its founders -Larry Page) and this rank had a direct correlation to content quality of the page.
The page rank was ideally an index ranging between 1-10, but was internally represented by a logarithmic index and the segmentation between 1 to 10 was done on a log scale.This naturally implies that it gets tougher to increase the page rank beyond a point since a page ranked at 6 cannot be considered to be twice better than a page ranked at 3. The actual differnce in quality between these pages internally may be a humungous number.
Why is link building such a vital part of the SEO strategy ?
Inbound Links from external pages in the real sense signifies the relevancy of content and highlights its read-worthiness. As a matter of fact, these links could be considered as a token of recommendation and hence more the number of inbound links, the merrier it is from the perspective of the credibility of the site and more credible the site, higher its ranking with respect to the search engines.
A quality inbound link is an effective qualifier for trustworthiness of the site, but as with any other mechanisms, people have found unethical ways to source inbound links, thus abusing the system in an effort to getting ranked high in SEO results. Some of such tactics that have been employed by webmasters and SEO practitioners are reciprocal linking, link exchanges, creation of multiple sites that ideally serve no real purpose and using these sites to create multiple inbound links to the main site. A number of small businesses were built around the revenue model of buying and selling of such fraudulent links and were able to make a lot of money with the new found linking formula.
As search robots and engines get more intelligent by the day, they have been able to track non-conformances and penalize such sly practices. Google engineers have been working diligently over the past few years to detect and curtail these black hat tactics and recently came out with the Penguin update by which they have been able to downgrade the ranking of websites involved in unnatural linking schemes. Google has particularly been very critical of these violations and has also penalized many of such erring sites by de-indexing them from their search database. The old link building tricks have started to lose their sheen but the search engines have a long way to go as people devise new ways to acquire and provide "natural appearing" links.
Link building - Best Practices
Earning genuine and quality links involves a lot of hardwork and some of the below practices help enhance the effectiveness of these links.
1. Since the search engines consider the page ranking/credibility of the link source, links from educational, news and govt related sites are regarded highly and such inbound links invariably boost search rankings.
2. It is generally easier to get links from sites directly under your control. For example, you could request a backlink from your vendors, suppliers as they probably know more about your products/services and would be inclined to include a back link than somebody with whom you dont have an existing relationship.
3. Try to improve the quality of the page content and get genuine links instead of contrived ones. The hard work and money spent on securing these fabricated links dont serve the purpose and is not worth the effort.
4.When getting links from external sites, pay special attention to the position of the links in the site. A link from a text region is considered more valuable than one that originates from a list of links.
5. Search engines can easily identify reciprocal links and such links dont add any real value for SEO.
6. A textual link works better than an image link as the search engines can decipher text content with ease.
7. Always include relevant keywords as anchor text within your links.
8. When making use of image links, make use of the alt attribute to include keywords.
9. Static text links serve the purpose better than dynamically generated ones (created on the fly using client side scripting)
10. Make use of internal links within the individual pages of the site using long tail keywords as these enable linking between in-site pages and also help in robot navigation and indexing.
11. Stay away from buying links as these wont help in the long term and also you run a risk of being detected and penalized by search engines when tracked. Just remember that the search robots are real smart and are on the job every day.
Undoubtedly, linking is one of the most effective strategies for improving your SEO ranking and a "right link" at the "right place" helps get the right SEO results.
Happy Link building !!
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