SEO - Link Building
Link building is one of the most important elements of SEO, and probably has the largest impact on a website's ranking. Of course it is important to select appropriate keywords and to perform the correct page optimisation first. The reason that link building holds so much sway is that it is the most difficult element to be manipulated by the actual website owner.
Anybody should be able to create a website, perform detailed keyword research, perform perfect optimisation and rank on the first page of Google, and there's the problem. If that were the case the BBC would probably rank on page 20 by now and wikipedia would be nowhere to be seen.
Google uses a website's link profile to validate it's importance, it's popularity and it's relevance to a specific subject. It's similar to the peer review process for scientific or research documents. The more people that have linked to your site from large authoritative sites, the better the standing that your site has within it's specific niche.
The result is that Google look at your site in comparison to the other sites that match the searched keyword to determine which site has the best backing by the online community. This poses an obvious question: Can you influence the number of links to your site?
The answer is thankfully yes. It's not an instant process, but one that takes time to build momentum. There are number of places online where you can legitimately raise your profile, including:
- Directories (DMOZ and Yahoo are well respected examples)
- Article sites (Such as articlebase and ezine)
- Press releases
- Forums
- Blogs
- Twitter / Linked-in and other forms of Social Media
- Industry associations
- Video Sites (YouTube)
All of the above examples would form part of a large companies 'normal' online profile, and as such are important if you wish to bolster your profile online. Sugar Free Media are able to assess your website's online strength (domain strength) and compare it to your competitors to provide a gauge of the effort required to rise above them in the search rankings.
There are two important elements of any link, the relevance of the site that it comes from and the anchor text that the user clicks on to go through to your site. The greater the match between the content on the linking site to your site the better. The anchor text (the part the user actually clicks) reaffirms the topic to Google. Therefore if there are 10 well respected sites, such as the BBC and DMOZ linking to your site with the anchor text "Chocolate Cookies", and the page that the links point to on your site is about chocolate cookies, then it's clear to Google that this is considered an important page for chocolate cookies.
The SEO Services section of this website provides an overview of the link building services that Sugar Free Media undertake for each package.