SEO link building - which websites are the best
Thursday, July 19th, 2007Links, links everywhere! But where, why? Hang on, who?
Link building is an important part in any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. In an attempt to make a website seem more popular with search engine spiders it is important to gain quality inbound links to your website.
Link popularity
OK, but what is popularity? Simply put, link popularity essentially describes how popular a website is based on the number of links from other sites pointing to it. For example a site with 100 inbound links is seen to be more important than a site with 10 inbound links.
Link quality
OK so now we have quantity, what about quality? The quality of the link is much more important than the quantity of links. A few good quality links can increase your websites search engine positioning much more than a huge amount of poor quality links. A quality website will have to following attributes:
- A high Google page rank
- Search engine friendly coding with all its pages indexable
- Relevant content to your particular site
- Small number of outgoing links on the page you will be linked on
- The links on the page should be well classified and focused
Avoid artificial link farms and web rings as search engine spiders will place no importance on these types of inbound link. As a general rule, if a link is not created to be read or followed by humans, the link will be considered spam.
Where to get quality links
A great place to start gain quality and relevant inbound links are website directories. Website directories provide a topical and categorised list of links. The Strongest Links website goes one step further by creating a list of website directories ranking them on the quality of link they will provide you.
Next comes the social websites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, MySpace and reddit which provide an easy way to create some user generated content (i.e. content generated by you, the user) with links to your website or a particular page /post on your website. These social websites generally have a lot of traffic and a high page rank which can filter through to your website with each link that you create, not to mention all the extra eyes you will have on your website.
It is a black art trying to gain quality inbound links to a website, one that I will forever be wrangling with. If you have any insights, suggestions or funny stories please let me know.
Technorati Tags: SEO, Interesting sites, link building, website directories, social websites
