Constructing link popularity is a single of the most important components of search engine optimisation and also one of the most time-consuming. It amazes me that I nonetheless obtain countless emails from so named Search engine optimisation professionals inviting me to participate in link exchanges. Official hidden wiki of them even providing to swap hyperlinks with a internet site entirely unrelated to what we do! No wonder our industry comes beneath such fire.
Let’s go back to basics and recognize the concept of linking. Linking in its simplest type is about taking a user on a stage in their on the internet journey, no matter if it be to come across a product, piece of news and details or to discover anything new. Now most of the time we know what we are looking for on-line, so our session has a aim, and with that aim in mind we look to trawl the net and place our trust in navigating about websites till we realize our purpose. Often it can take minutes and a straight forward stop by to a search engine and a destination web site, other occasions it can requires us hours, with a journey that requires us in and out of a number of various internet sites.
Now if you preserve that notion in mind when considering about link creating you’ll soon realise that the ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ method to developing hyperlink reputation is fundamentally flawed. Links really should be awarded on merit and not via back scratching.
Searching for out link exchanges is an inefficient use of your time
What I am going to tell you subsequent is going to transform the way you strategy building hyperlink recognition. Let’s take a look at a classic link swap situation. You first of all commit a couple of days searching for internet sites that have hyperlink swap directories on their web page. You make contact with the webmaster explaining that you would like to engage in a link exchange. The webmaster agrees to hyperlink to you after you have placed a link back to his web-site very first. You set up the hyperlink and email the webmaster. You go to the web-site to check your hyperlink and you locate your link buried deep within the website on a page that has a low page rank and surrounded by 50 other net hyperlinks. You then repeat the course of action with another web page. Now here comes the killer, you’ve spent all that time creating up those hyperlinks, a handful of months later you return to some of the site’s exactly where your link was placed and you obtain that some of them have been removed. You get in touch with the webmasters and ask them why your hyperlink has been removed. They get back to you and inform you it was an accident. Yeh appropriate, they removed the link deliberately so they could get a 1 way hyperlink from you. After a handful of months has passed you notice that your link reputation has not elevated in Google – so once again you revisit some of the internet sites that had been linking to you and check your links (or by now you may well have bought some hyperlink checking application to do that for you). You see that your hyperlinks are still there, but you have study that from time to time webmaster’s adopt sneaky strategies to avoid the search engine spiders from following the link. Low and behold you see inside the supply code of a single internet site that they are working with a “nofollow” tag on the hyperlink.
Now tell me is all this work worth it? Link exchanges open up a new can of worms for you – coming into contact with black hat SEOs!
Now take into consideration the opposite. Why not spend the time on developing compelling content or interactive tools that people today will naturally want to hyperlink to. Not only are they probably to give you with a link from a web page that is likely to be visited, but it will be a one particular way hyperlink, and a few one particular way hyperlinks from respected internet websites are worth more than 50 reciprocals, take my word for it. Plus you’ll have some thing of true value on your internet site that guests will use and could even tell other men and women about. With this approach to link building you’ll produce far more ‘noise’ about your website and encourage other website owners to link to you, simply because you’ll have one thing on your own web site, that will be of interest to their personal visitors.
With link creating it really is improved to consider about building a name for yourself and focus on developing your on the web reputation as opposed to expanding your list of reciprocal link partners. So the message is clear: ‘quality more than quantity’ is what counts when it comes to expanding link recognition.