Link Building Campaigns
What is Link Building?
Once a sites content and structure have been optimised, it needs to have links built to it on a continuous basis. Links from other web sites pointing to yours help push your site up the rankings for your keywords and the words contained within the link text.
Here is an example linking scenario:
Site 4 is being linked to by sites 1, 2 and 3. A likely reason for this is that site 4 contains great content or tools for people to use, lets say a mortgage calculator. Sites 1, 2 and 3 all have content talking about mortgages and offer this link to their readers because it helps them make informed decisions about what mortgage they can or cannot afford.
These links from content related sites, will push site 4 further up the rankings for the phrase mortgage calculator, assuming that is the text that the other sites use within the link they build contains "mortgage calculator". The more sites linking to site 4 in this manner the higher it will climb in the rankings.
Why is Link Building so important to search engine optimisation? Links are so important because they are so powerful in creating very high rankings, this is due to Google's emphasis on seeing links from one site to another as votes towards the quality of content on that site.
So if Google sees two identical pages of content talking about mortgages but one has 10 links pointing to it and the other 100. The site with the most inbound links from other content related sites will rank higher.
The reason Google works in this way is that when they were creating their search engine and devising ways of identifying the difference between a quality site and a junk site, they noticed that most of the quality sites had other related sites linking to them. This fundament pattern is still at the heart of Google's algorithm and is the main reason they still deliver quality results in their search engine rankings.
Other search engines use links in a similar way but Google seems to place much more emphasis in this area than any of its competitors.
What kinds of link building are there?
There are typically two kinds of links you need to consider when optimising a site. Firstly, reciprocal links and secondly, one-way links.
Reciprocal links example:
As shown above, a reciprocal link occurs when 2 sites are linking back and forth to each other. Whilst this is better than no links at all, reciprocal links don't offer as much weight to your search engine rankings as they once did. This is because people began swapping links with each other in order to help move higher up search results and this was seen by Google as manipulating their results to some extent.
Google recently down graded the value of links that reciprocate each other. This means that you will see some benefit from this form of linking but nowhere near as much as in the past. They argue that sites will typically not reciprocate links in a "natural" environment. Natwest may have a great mortgage calculator but they would never link back to each site that linked to their calculator!
One-way link example:
One-way links are much more powerful in achieving high search engine rankings. This is because they more accurately represent the "natural" linking Google looks for in its algorithm. Often these links are bought and therefore a budget needs to be included within your campaign for the purchase of one-way links from content related sites.
In conclusion, link building is incredibly important to any effective SEO campaign. This is just an introduction to links and how they are built. There are far more sophisticated ways of building links and we can easily meet your needs within our campaign offering.
Contact Us
To discuss this further fill in the contact us form or call one of our specialists on 0870 199 6382.