Link Building

Why is link building important?

With most of the top search engines and especially Google, link building is probably the single most important element of search engine optimisation (SEO). More often than not link building is neglected by website owners and as a result their sites don't appear very high on the search engine results pages (SERPS) for anything other than the business name.

Whilst the link building process is fairly straightforward it does require a little bit of skill, because it is not simply a case of going out and establishing the biggest number of links in order to appear high up the list of search results. Factors such as the relevance, quality and anchor text used play important roles in the process.

There are three main types of link building as follows:

• Free, one-way inbound links using quality web directories, blogs, article sites, PR sites and forums, such as www.dmoz.org
• Paid link building including portal/directory site advertising and paid inclusion on directories either for a quick inclusion or placement on a higher ranking page.
• Reciprocal link exchanges with quality (PR2+) and related websites.

Paid inclusion on directories appears to be a grey area at present as Google appears to have outlawed this approach during the early part of 2008. Many directories that sell links have been stripped of their Google PageRank, or have at least seen a drop in PageRank. The reason appears to be because buying links on pages that already have a strong PageRank is deemed to be cheating the system compared to establising reciprocal links, or normal free directory listings. Our advice would be to stay clear of paid directory links for the time being as it could harm your own website's PageRank rather than help improve it.

Link building not only improves your site's placement on the top search engines it also helps increase your site's PageRank, the number of official backwards links and increases the amount of traffic to your website.

Our highly skilled SEO consultants could perform a low cost one-off or ongoing link building campaign on your behalf, in order to force your website further up the search engine listings.

If you would like us to undertake a link building campaign to help improve your site's placement on Google and the other major search engines, please email or call us on 0845 643 5573.