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The Importance of
Link Building to SEO Success
By Angela Charles
President, Pilot Fish
A
report came out recently that described the Top 10 factors
to getting your site positioned on Google.
If you've had a chance to follow developments in the web site
marketing industry, you'd know that the subject of links and
link building is a pretty hot topic right now.
The reason has everything to do with Google and the method
by which it ranks sites for its search engine. Why is Google
able to determine what web site developers should be concerned
about? Marketshare. As of January, Google
was handling an impressive 53 percent of all Internet searches,
making it the 800 lb. gorilla of search engines.
In order to drive traffic to your web site, your site must
be easily found by prospects and customers. Traditional advertising
methods help, like printing your URL on print ads, business
cards, letterhead and brochures, but 81%
of Internet users say they use search engines to find
information they need, making search engines the #1 place
you should focus your efforts in getting visibility for your
site.
Unfortunately, over the years, this has become an increasingly
tricky proposition. When search engines like Yahoo and Google
first came about, they freely roamed the web, crawling sites
and publishing links. But, as the number of web pages continued
to grow to astronomical proportions, it became necessary for
the search engines to create a method by which they would
prioritize what they would display.
Initially, Google and other search engines focused largely
on the invisible Meta tags that accompany each web page. Savvy
web site owners understood that loading their keywords into
these tags would easily propel them to the top of the search
engine listings. Unfortunately, it also was very simple for
disreputable businesses to manipulate (or spam) these tags,
thereby luring Internet users to sites that weren't even related
to the information they were seeking.
In an effort to prevent this type of manipulation and to clean
up their indexes so that only the most relevant results would
be shown for any particular search, Google and others changed
their ranking algorithms to focus also on the content of the
web pages. The purpose was to guarantee a high likelihood
that any given link would yield the information that Internet
users were seeking, to improve the quality of results on their
sites.
This worked to a point. As one might imagine, there can be
thousands, if not millions of web pages on any given topic,
some better than others. And, again over time, more and more
people learned how to use the new algorithm to alter their
sites' search engine positioning, causing a shift in the credibility
of results toward optimized pages that weren't necessarily
relevant.
Again, Google refined its ranking methodology (actually, there
have been several additional steps in between, none important
enough to mention here). What Google decided was that rather
than have its robots try to determine the importance of one
web site over another just by the content or Meta tags on
those sites, it would take a broader view at what the industry
thought about those sites.
Throughout the development of the Internet, it's become commonplace
for site owners to give credit to other sites for the content
they publish. They do this by putting a link on their site
to the web page of the other site. Consider it like a footnote
in a research paper - a way to reference the work of someone
else. You'll see that I've added links in this very article
to reference the source of information I've quoted.
Over time, any given site can accrue a large number of incoming
links from other sites pointing at them. For instance, plastics
and rubber portal Polysort has more than 4,000 incoming
links from myriad sites including universities, research centers,
plastics and rubber companies and the government. These represent
doorways for Internet users to find the site as well as affirmation
that the content on Polysort is respected by those sites.
At the same time, Google decided that measuring the number
and quality of these types of links was a good way to determine
the importance of a web site. For example, if members of the
industry thought highly enough to provide a link to Polysort,
then the site must be important to the industry and deserve
a high position on Google.
In comparing one site to the next, Google now takes the number
and quality of incoming links into consideration, along with
the content of the web page relative to the keyword search,
meta tags, site structure and other factors. Read about how
Google also is dividing web
content into two separate indexes, which could affect
your site's visibility.
Back to the report issued recently that identified the Top
10 factors that impact a site's position on Google. Seven
of those 10 factors relate to links, whether incoming, outgoing
or internal.
For many sites that previously performed well on Google but
now find they've lost position, it's likely that part of the
problem is related to a lack of incoming links.
For sites that are new to search engine marketing, one will
need to give attention to every factor important to search
engine positioning, including identification of appropriate keywords to target through SEO keyword research, on-page optimization through SEO copywriting and a coordinated
effort to gather incoming links.
Contact
Pilot Fish for assistance with your search engine optimization
and link-building strategy at
877-799-9994
ext. 2104
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