Links that point to your site, from other sites, are a crucial part of increasing your websites credibility in the eyes of the search engines. The more links that point to your site, the more authority the search engines will perceive your site as having.
Find some useful resources about building links here.
It’s the SEO activity which is the probably the most outsourced as it typically doesn’t require much creativity, just time and an eye for opportunity. But link building can be a very big influencer, in terms of your ranking and how Google perceives your website in general.
Many of the tips that are given for an effective SEM strategy are often beyond the technical capabilities of a normal website owner, who perhaps just hired an SEO company to do some light optimisation.
It’s been an issue that’s plagued the Google webmaster forums for the better part of this year but finally, this month, Matt Cutts (head of webspam at Google) announced that a link disavow tool is now available to all website owners using Google Webmaster Tools, giving users the ability to tell Google to ignore specific backlinks.
Links have been the subject of great contention, amongst both search engines and search engine optimisers.
In search engine optimisation, we obviously have to base our practices on what we observe from ranking shifts and, equally importantly, from what search engines are willing to tell us. And what Google and Bing had been saying for a while, was that link signals in SEO were going to get valued less and less with time.
It’s an SEO activity that’s fallen into some disrepute since Google’s algorithm updates began focusing on link spam. Before that it was seen by many as the only rank optimising activity that could get you results. But then unethical linking practices forced Google to change their algorithm.
Link exchanges started in a time when search engine weighting algorithms could be described as little more than rudimentary. Spamming was hard to detect, let alone penalise. Link building was the one and only effective SEO exercise during this period. From that sentiment grew an industry of easy linking solutions. Most of them completely unethical.
Links have always been the yard-stick search engines use to measure and rank the relative importance of a specific website. Of course, some links weigh more than others but the basic principle still seemed to apply: links are the only thing that can save you from drowning in an ocean of websites and content.
Links pointing to your website help determine your authority on the Internet, the more authority you have, the better your chances of high search engine placements. The tools below will help you understand the importance of link building and back links.
SEO is the art of attracting more traffic, and therefore more business to your website; doing so by moving it as far as possible up the search engine placements as possible.
