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| Link Strategy Benefits |
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What are the benefits of having links?
- Links to other websites help to drive more traffic to your website by increasing the number of paths to your website. When a visitor to a third party website sees a link to your website there is a chance they will click on it and consequently visit your website.
- The more websites that are linking to your website then the higher your search engine ranking will grow.
- Having links to other websites helps you get listed in the top search engines.
- More incoming links generate more traffic and consequently quicker and better search engine rankings. More incoming links pointing to your website will improve your link popularity but those incoming links are of most benefit if they are from relevant websites. The more relevant an incoming link, therefore, the more credible your website will appear.
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Why are links important?
- An incoming link is seen as a "vote of confidence" by search engines and will improve your ranking.
- The page's content, the number of links on the page and the words that are actually linked (usually underlined) all affect how important that link is for your ranking on any given search
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- An incoming link from a very busy website or website page might bring you dozens or hundreds of visitors a day from that one link.
- If you build more incoming links to your website and diversify the sources of your visitors you will be protecting yourself from the dips and spikes in traffic that can come from relying on traffic that the major search engines bring.
- Search engines also use incoming links as a "trigger" when deciding what pages their automated data collection programs (spiders) will visit. For example, if you put up a new website it may take quite a while before it gets visited by a search engine spider. On the other hand, if the search engine spots a strong incoming link pointing to your website from a "trusted" source, it will be much more likely to move your website up the spider "visiting" queue.
- Incoming links are important from a search engine ranking perspective. Search engines take a lot of factors into account in the algorithms they use to calculate ranking, including incoming links. Whilst the way search engines use incoming link information in their overall ranking calculations is known only to themselves what they are principally considering is the quantity, relevance and strength of incoming links:
- Quantity is simply the total number of incoming links pointing to a particular website or website page, sometimes referred to as the link popularity of a site.
- Relevance relates to the similarity to your website of the website linking to you. If your website was concerned with vintage cars then a link to a website concerned with ladies fashion would not be very relevant but a link to another vintage car website would be just about as good as it gets. Links to other websites related to vintage vehicles would be good and links to websites concerned with vehicles is general, vehicle parts etc. would be deemed to have some relevance. The relevance of a single page or section of a website can also be important. If a website, which was essentially a diary of events, had a page relating to vintage car rallies then that page could have high relevance even though the overall website would not have.
- Strength depends on the relevance and quantity of links pointing to the website or website page. In the case of Google the overall strength of the page is known as its Page Rank.
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| Related links: |
| Keyword analysis |
| Search Engine Positioning |
| Online Marketing Strategy Audit |
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