The number of websites linking to your website not only directly
increases the number of visitors to your website, they also
indirectly help with search engine optimisation and as such
the more links your website has the better it is rated.
Everyone knows that you have to have inbound links into
your site in order for the search engines to value it and
rank it highly against your chosen keywords. But is it better
to buy those links from a link broker or directly from the
site itself, or to go through time-consuming effort of building
reciprocal links? The problem with links, is in actually
gaining enough links on enough websites to actually make
it worthwhile, although reciprocal links are effective, they
are extremely hard to gain and although you might gain a
few hundred links in this way you will never gain the potential
thousands that a suitable link development strategy can achieve.
Let us be clear: both of these methods are clearly against
the spirit of the Google ranking algorithm, which uses the
quality and quantity of inbound links as a substitute for
having someone actually look at your site and take a view
on its quality and value. Quite apart from the subjective
nature of such a judgment, the sheer number of web pages
out there would make this an impossible task. So links are
- for better or for worse - the easiest proxy for a human
judgment. However, both paid links, or text link ads, and
reciprocal links clearly subvert the intent of the link-counting
algorithm, since neither of them represent the disinterested
judgment of real people; both are nakedly designed to deceive
Google and the other search engines into thinking that more
people value your site than your competitors’, when
quite the opposite might be true.
Nonetheless, for the time being, it is undeniable that you
can buy your way into favour with the search engines either
by paying for text link ads or by spending time persuading
other people to reciprocate links with your site. Which is
better? Hard-won experience with both strategies suggests
that a combination of both is ideal. Unless your site and
your links pages have themselves some PageRank your reciprocal
link building process is going to be slow and painful. Webmasters
with high PR sites will not see much value in linking to
you, and it will take a long time to build PR through linking
to low or zero PR sites.
This implies a simple strategy: buy some high PR text link
ads, point them at both your homepage and your links page
and wait for the PR to feed through and for Google to give
you a decent PR on both pages. In the meantime you can start
on the process of reciprocal link building with lower-ranked
sites, and once your own ranking has come through you can
start to request links from high-value sites. When the receiving
webmaster sees that you can offer him links from a PR4 or
5 web page he will be much more inclined to treat you with
civility and offer you high-ranking links in return. Pretty
soon after this you will be able to stop paying for text
link ads and start benefiting from the free marketing that
comes with a top-ranked site for your chosen search terms.
Link development is fundamental for search engine marketers.
It's very difficult for a site to get long-term search engine
traffic without it. The focus should always be on high-quality
links, not a large quantity of low-quality links. SEMs must
teach their clients how to correctly request links from high-quality,
non-competitive sites. With successful link development,
Web sites can receive long-term, cumulative search engine
traffic. Just do it right.
Paras Shah
Email: parassshah@gmail.com
ItsAllAboutLinks
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