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