Link Building

Link building is the cornerstone of any SEO strategy. Building links is one of the most important things that you will need to do in order to get traffic organically to your website. It is also time consuming and one of the trickiest elements to get right. Think of links as the indicator as to how good your website is. There is a big difference between a site that looks good to the human eye and one that looks good to the search engine bots. The search engines don't see websites the same way that we see them. What we do know, is that the search engines use an algorithm and the number of high quality links you have pointing to your website determines how high up the rankings your website appears. 

As with any program or logic, achieving perfection isn't realistic. It is also true that many of the black hat techniques (not favoured by the search engines) can make it through to achieve a short term benefit - ultimately, adopting them will send your site to an early grave, even if there is a short term gain. There are no short cuts in building quality links. Ultimately other quality websites won't want to link to you if your website doesn't hit a certain level of excellence. Building a few random links here and there will land you in the realm of mediocrity, at best. 

What are links?

A link or hyperlink is what links one web page to another - it's the essence of what the World Wide Web is and the foundation for what makes the internet such an incredible chain of information. In terms of Mr X and his website, the main driver in link building is to increase the link popularity of a website and its internal pages. The more websites that create routes into our sites, the more other websites know about it and the more visits we could potentially get. Search engines see a link as a recommendation or vote. The more votes, the more credibility you have and the better the website is seen to be. If you've been doing your homework, you should by now know that all links are not equal. Some links are far easier to build than others and so don't carry the same weight, or reward. 

The concept is no different from many other more familiar practices in life. If we wanted to get a number of references for our business - the best references would be from industry leaders - people who are credible in the field. The same is true in relation to link building. Building links from authority sites should be your goal, as these provide the greatest benefits. To achieve this you will however need content worthy of the link.

Convincing people to link to us isn't easy, especially if your content is average. When we build great content, quality links are built to our content naturally. People share your content, tell their friends about it and website owners have no issues linking to you out of merit. 

With low grade content, we only attract low grade links from spammy websites that have been created with the sole merit of making a few pennies. The search engines today have considerably better algorithms to determine the quality of links, which was bolstered by their Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird updates - Searchengineland keep a good record of the updates that are applied to Google. 

Creating a natural link profile that is steadily building quality links should be the aim. This means building at a steady pace and from the right sites. Combined with the links you'll generate through natural means, you're making a statement: Our site is high quality and worth it's place at the top of the results.

Form partnerships and collaborations; run competitions; be resourceful - the sky is the limit. The objective must not be to build any old link - we need to build the right links from the right sites that deliver the SEO punch we require.

Another key consideration is that the Google algorithm favours websites / pages that link to other top resources. After all, that's the essence of the internet. Achieving top results attracts links from website owners that know this. Get it right from the start and things can very easily snowball in the right direction.

Ok, so we know link building and SEO are connected in an important way. But what exactly is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of a website gaining more visibility (.i.e. more people find your website) within the search engine results.

There are two key components associated with SEO - 'On Page' and 'Off Page' SEO. The On-Page element relates to the things we can change on the physical web page (like the words, links, images, content). This is the element that is easier to control as we can open the page and make changes as and when we need to. We can control the words on the page, how they're arranged and formatted. We can control the code code that is used behind the scenes. Unfortunately, the On Page factors won't be enough to rank well, unless there is next to no competition. Off Page SEO encompasses all the factors that are not on a physical web page. This includes link building, anchor text variation, social signals, likeability and the personalisation factor (face to the name).

As your company or organisation grows, so should your SEO effort. You will have more key pages over time and as you expand, you will need more links to these new pages to get them ranked. The more competitive the keywords and phrases are, the more links that are needed, especially if we're to hit the top ranking positions. Through building organic traffic online, we take delivery of an steady supply of traffic. Achieving top rankings is not easy. Staying there is even harder. We should be continually validating what works and what doesn't and the methods that the search engines use to measure your website quality is constantly changing. This means tracking results along the journey. This monitoring, validation and tweaking plays a big part in the life of any SEO - particularly as the goal posts are continually on the move. 

The search engines also place varying levels of weight from one link to the next. A link from a top authority site is considerably more valuable than one from a low grade site. Google places a lot of weight on the quality of the website and web page providing the link. This means we want to build links that say quality and links that are likely to stay in place for the long run. We only achieve this through high quality information on our pages. The logic is simple - the higher quality and older the website, the more authority it has. Similarly, the older the link, the more credit it is given as it is seen as a legitimate link (one that's built out of merit). Paid links or links from low grade websites tend to come and go. 

Ok so what do we do? Unfortunately we can't build your links for you - that's down to you. Once you have these quality links built - that's where we can provide real value. Lotrax can monitor your built links round the clock - and the best part? You can set what parameters you want to monitor. As soon as there's an issue that can be seen as a red flag to the search engines, you will know.  We have built Lotrax so it is easy to use! The tool requires no technical skills. If you know what a URL is and what anchor text is - you have enough to get by. 

Create a FREE account and try Lotrax for 30 days. All you need is a valid email address - we want you to try the tool our so we won't ask for any payment details. If you like what you see after 30 days - you can move to one of our payment plans. The sign up process takes 2 minutes to get started.

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