Link Building Program

Link Building Program
SEO Linking Service

Link building is an essential part of search engine optimization and is critical for long term ranking success with Google.

Here is part of what Google says about linking:

Make sure that other sites link to yours
Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our measure of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives to determine its PageRank, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Please note that ranking of sites in our search results is completely automated, and we don't manually assign keywords to sites.

The Best Way to Implement A Link Building Program

There is an important progression in creating a website that works well with organic search.  Many linking "services" are not well rounded in search engine optimization.  They want to sell you as many links as they can as fast as they can.  This is likely to result in serious damage to your rankings.  There are some other things that need to be done first in preparation for linking:

• Structural correctness - making sure there are no barriers in your website to prevent search engine spiders and robots from reading all of your content
• Excellent content - creating pages that are targeted to things we know people are searching for from search phrase research
• Link building at a moderate pace based on the age of your website online and the growth of visitation to your website with the linking program supporting your excellent content with the most important pages in your website in priority order that will bring you the most bang for the buck
• Read more about earning better search engine rankings.

Research Your Competition First

Competitive research is critical to creating a good link building program.  The number of links that you eventually need to your website should be based on what is needed to outperform your competitors.

The research and analysis also needs to include comparisons of the quality of their content versus your content, the number of pages in their website versus your website and other factors.

Periodically monitoring the rate of growth of links in to your competitors is also important to determine if they are actively moving forward or sitting on their laurels.

Some of the websites linking to your competitors may also be willing to link to you.

Determining the Rate of Link Growth

If you have a brand new website, link growth should be modest to start.  A goal of 40 to 60 links per month is likely adequate.

If your website has been online for several years or you have a Google PageRank of 2 or higher, a growth rate of 60 to 100 or more links per month may be acceptable.  The visitation rate will tell us something, also.

Regardless, I think it is prudent to keep linking growth moderate.  Why?  Because you may not need hundreds of links to achieve your ranking goals for any particular page and your budget would thus be better spent by working on the most important secondary pages in your website, not just the home page.

An example: 120 links has brought a New York City real estate website from beyond Google page 10 to number 3 on Google page 1 at the moment.  The improvement in ranking was preceded by getting the website structurally correct and making significant improvements to the home page content.  The ascent has taken 5 months.  We are likely to be number 1 page 1 shortly if the client continues.

Does Your Website Need Links?

You can have good search engine rankings for niche targets without any links in to your website.  But, for highly competitive targets, and, as your website ages online, Google expects you will have more links into your website over time.

If you have been struggling with trying to improve already good content and are not seeing results, then it is likely time for a link building program.  Our SEO linking service is modestly priced.

We have a solid program that works and can give you multiple examples and references.  Please contact us today.

Update on Google's New Patent About Linking

Google's new patent "Determining quality of linked documents" gives us an idea about how Google judges the influence of a link for the ranking of a web page.  The patent reads:

"A ranking component ranks documents, such as web pages or web sites, to obtain a ranking score that defines a quality judgment of the document. The ranking score of a particular document is based on the ranking score of the documents which link to it and based on affiliation among the documents."

So, according to the patent, Google may assign a maximum value to links that come from affiliated pages and may also assign individual values to links from independent pages.

Google may use a number of methods to evaluate affiliation, including interlinking between or among pages, by the hostname, domain name or subdomain name of the website, by IP address or by related visitors.

The award of the patent occurred on August 24, 2010, but the methods described in the patent have likely been in use for several years.  The message in the patent to website owners is get as many high quality links as possible from as many different websites as possible, avoid automated linking programs and favor quality of links over the quantity.

If you have been struggling with trying to improve already good content and are not seeing results, then it is likely time for a link building program.  Our SEO linking service is modestly priced.

We have a solid program that works and can give you multiple examples and references.  Please contact us today.