There are a lot of things that go into where your page is positioned in search results. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) helps your site get noticed and one aspect of that is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Arguably one of the most important parts of SEO are links. Both incoming and outgoing links play into your site ranking. But how do we effect these links? The answer is link building.
What is Link Building?
Link Building refers to the process of gaining links to build the popularity of your site. While links aren’t the only thing that determines your placement, they are very important. Think of the search results as a popularity contest and each link as a vote. The more votes you get the more popular you are and the better your ranking.
How Do You Build Links?
There are some easy ways to get links to your site. The easiest is to use any of your partner sites or people you work with regularly to link back to your site. You can also have brand loyal customers link back to your site. Just this week one of our client’s asked us to link to their site, and gave us the HTML code which included a graphic and a link to their site.
It might help to give some sort of incentive in order to accumulate links. You can create a database of site directors and e-mail out links that are relevant to them in hopes that they will link back to you. But keep in mind that the site director won’t post your link on their site and you won’t have loyal followers if you don’t create quality content.
Quality Not Quantity
It’s not just about the quantity of the links when link building; it’s about the quality. Search engines take into account the quality of the sites you are linked on. They believe that quality sites have quality links just as spam sites do not link to quality sites.
Google highly values links from authority sites. Authority sites are websites with high quality content. So quality content = authority site = quality links.
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