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www.searchengineposition.com
There has been lots of talk lately in the web world about link building.
What exactly is link building you ask? In a nutshell it’s collecting links that point to your site and submitting them to the search engines. Doesn’t seem too hard, does it?
In fact, there are many services out there which claim they can provide you with “thousands” of links to your site. I’m sure your email inbox has been bombarded with such spam offerings. I know mine has. The truth is, most of these types of “link farms” are ineffective and can even get you banned from many search engines.
That’s the catch. While it’s not too hard to collect links and submit them, it is hard to collect qualified links. That is, links that help convey that your website is the authority in your chosen field.
Confused? Let me explain some more.
Many search engines, such as Google, measure a site’s “worth” based on a number of criteria including the number of links that point to it. The more links pointing to you, the more likely that you are the best source for what people are searching for. This was the theory as recently as early this year. Then something interesting happened. Someone figured out that the more links that point to you for a particular phrase, the better you will do for that particular phrase than your competitors. They tested this theory by encouraging other sites to post the link on their sites, sometimes in exchange for reciprocal links, most times not. This led to the phenomena called “Google Bombing” where a bunch of private, personal, unrelated sites got into the business of trading links to see who could rank the highest for different phrases.
Through trading these links, you could, in effect, outrank Microsoft for the term “Microsoft” by having enough other sites putting a hyperlink to your site on the term “Microsoft”.
Google soon countered this strategy by changing how it ranks pages. No longer does the volume of links matter, it’s now the quality of those links that matter.
Here is another example. Let’s assume you make widgets. In addition to having sufficient content explaining your widgets (such as your manufacturing process, customer testimonials, history of widgets, etc.) you also need to have other sites giving you what could be considered as references, by linking to you on the term “widgets.” In doing so, they are affirming to the search engines that you are indeed the authority on widgets.
Seems simple right? Wrong. Why? Check out part two of link building.
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