Once you have your website up and running, it is time to start the process of getting users to frequent it. But in the vast mass of web content floating in cyberspace, it is quite easy to be lost among the sea of material. That is why SEO is absolutely crucial for any business that wants effective marketing.
And within SEO, one of the most important factors is that of link building, which is the process of strategically building connections between your website and similar pages.
Link building is important for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, and most intuitively, the more times users are presented with opportunities to browse your site, the more likely that they will “click-through”. This is why being featured in a news story or a popular blog can create a nice lift in your web traffic.
Secondly, and more importantly, links are a major way in which search engines rank results to their user’s queries. And given the fact that 93% of web experiences begin with a search engine, this ranking is vitally important to the success of your website.
But what do search engines look for in link patterns?
Well, a search engine views a link as the way websites recommend other websites. So what they are looking for is very much like what you might look for in a recommendation from a friend or co-worker.
Quality
If a friend insists that you try some new restaurant, you will probably put more weight behind that suggestion than if someone you hardly know were to tell you the same thing. Likewise, search engines favor suggestions from well-known sites over those of seeming strangers.
So the quality of the site that is linking to you, and how much it is already trusted by the search engine, is incredibly important.
Theme
The best suggestions come from people who actually know what they are talking about. That is why search engines give more weight to links from sites with similar, relevant topics. For instance, if you had a business selling dog houses, then a link from a pet-lovers blog would be valued more highly than one from a travel blog. Relevancy and context matters.
Freshness
As with all recommendations, time matters; you are much more likely to watch that new TV show that all your friends are talking about now than one from a few years ago.
Likewise, search engines give more weight to fresh links than to those which have gotten stale with time. Hence, the process of link building is never really finished.
That is why at Sticky we have developed a unique and highly sophisticated process for cultivating high quality, relevant links for our clients website’s. This has led to some extraordinary search results and substantial increases in qualified traffic. It is now a crucial component of our Total SEO program.
If you would like to see massive growth in online visitors and enquires via sophisticated SEO, get in touch.
