Linking

linking Search engines have for some years relied on analysis of the nature and quantity of inbound links to determine the importance and relevance of websites.

In general, if a site is linked to by many important and relevant sites, it must be relevant and important itself. The search engines are constantly trying to deliver the most relevant results for any particular search query, so the links pointing in to a site have a big impact on the ranking of that site.

Linking campaigns

As our understanding of how search engines analyse links has increased, we have become experts in taking advantage of this to increase our client's rankings. “Linking campaigns” have become an important part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The usual process is to create a links page on the website being marketed, send requests to many related websites requesting to swap links, check the responses, check to see that the links do appear on the external sites, and add the relevant links to the links page.

Problems with traditional linking campaigns

The above process is often really an attempt to fool the search engines into believing that a site is popular and important, when really the links obtained in this way might only indicate that someone has spent a lot of time swapping links.

Huge volumes of spam are generated by automated linking programs, often the linking is between unrelated sites, and the results of the search engines have been somewhat compromised.

In response to this, search engines (Google in particular) are using stricter and more advanced methods to determine natural vs. automated or “spammy” types of linking. This has important implications for webmasters in their efforts to increase online visibility.

Long-term linking strategies

Link analysis will continue to be a very important factor in how search engines rank sites. In the long term, however, we have found that the best strategies involve our clients

having great content that other sites will want to link to
swapping links with sites where there is a genuine reason for interlinking over and above increasing link popularity
providing outbound links primarily for the benefit of their visitors

Reciprocal linking vs. one way linking

Reciprocal linking has been depreciated to some degree and it is believed that one-way links are given much more weight then reciprocal links, as these are more likely to be “natural” as opposed to being solely there to increase rankings.

Type of links

The quality and relevance of links is now emphasized over quantity.

The pages from which links are obtained should:

be on topic
be reasonably established in the search engines themselves (some indication of this is given by Google’s Page Rank)
not be full of ads
have as few links as possible
not be named links.html or similar

We do not add links on link farms (sites containing nothing but links), ad sites, and unrelated sites as these will not benefit your site and might even result in a negative influence on rankings.

Deep linking

Most people will link to a site's homepage. Now, it is more important for webmasters to attract links that point directly to the relevant pages of their sites using anchor text that's relevant to the specific pages.

Directories

Directories are website databases compiled by people, as opposed to search engines, which filter sites automatically using computer programs. Inclusion in some of the larger and more important directories is considered to be an important factor in increasing link popularity and hence obtaining good search engine rankings. We submit out clients to many quality national and international directories as a large part of our linking campaign.

It is important that the text used in the submission process ties in with the keywords and phrases for which the home page has been optimised.

Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. Having a listing in this directory is very important, as many search engines draw results from this directory.

Yahoo! Directory

This is also an important directory, although it was much more important some years ago than it is now. The cost for submission to this directory is $299 per annum.

Other directories

There are many directories online which offer free listings. Your site should be submitted to at least the most important of these.

Outbound links

Outbound links are also somewhat important and help the search engines to assess the type of Internet “neighbourhood” to which your site belongs. The more relevant, large and well ranked the sites being linked to, the better.

The provision of links to useful external websites is in itself a good way of making the site a strong resource for visitors, so it is recommended that links to relevant sites be included on all optimised pages.

If you're interested in our linking campaigns or any of the other services we offer, please contact us in Cape Town, South Africa on (021) 4489280 or via our Contact Us page for a free consultation.