Thursday, July 31, 2008

Link Building - Is It Worth It?

By Steve Nicel


With many businesses engaging in advertising wars in order to win over the majority of the Internet's viable market, it's easy to deduce the intensity of the competition. After all, the Internet and its network of information grow exponentially by the minute, while the increase in the number of users more or less takes a little slower.

In the hopes of gaining a steady traffic flow to your company Web site, some businesses utilise paid advertising on high exposure commercial portals of the Internet. If traffic volume is already established on these large portals with a proven advertising model, this can be a great way to launch your Web site and start getting traffic immediately. Pay per click (PPC) is another great way of getting instant traffic to your website because this requires no start-up costs at all. The big advantage of this model is that you only pay for the traffic that is generated from the advertisers Web site directly to your Web site.

These two methods of advertising are good when you're looking for a quick boost of direct web site traffic in the search engines paid query results. In direct contrast to organic search engine ranking, you are able to expose your website quickly to a potentially huge consumer market without investing long hours and the associated learning curve for more traditional organic search engine ranking.

Query results in search engines, or the matches found by a search engine to the keywords entered by the user, are important because of the fact that these are the most effective tools through which users try to access information on the Internet. The volume of information existent on various topics is simply overwhelming, which is the reason why people make use of search engines to do for them the dirty work of going through Internet clutter and give them results ranked on the basis of relevance to what they are exactly looking for.

Google adwords utilize a proprietary ranking system within the advertising framework. The nature of this system is forcing advertisers to model their ads very closely to their advertised website. As advertisers move away from making their ads relevant, and therefore less useful to the keyword searcher, Google filters these websites and either charges a premium for their listing or positions their ad lower down the search results. This ensures a higher quality of advertised listings and more useful information for the searcher.

The primary aim should always be to provide quality information in a highly relevant context and target keywords that relate closely to your websites main topic or theme. Your search engine marketing should always retain a primary focus on studying which keywords yield traffic that benefits your business the most, then set about structuring your web site to meet this demand. Enter link building for your business.

However, with the Internet being as competitive as it is, it is not enough to employ just one of the many methods to increase traffic. Another means that has been acclaimed in truly delivering increased traffic into the website within the framework of SEO is link-building. Link-building is the process through which one website is advertised in another website dealing with a similar field of interest. Usually, an exchange of links can happen, which can provide mutual benefits to both businesses.

Link-building, and being in productive link exchanges, can make or break a SEO campaign to optimize the search engine. It requires a degree of experience and loads of interactive communication in order to make sure that the link does end up published in another website. When this does happen, your website can appear on the search engine more than once-the first is the direct page of the website containing it; the rest are outside access points from links by other pages.

If the primary reason for attaining back links to your website is to prove to the search engines that you are an authority site, then it stands to reason that you must also create the impression of expertise and knowledge with everything that you do. With this impression comes an increase in perceived value and trust. This trust and increased authority will as a result attract more web sites wishing to be affiliated with you. And so the cycle continues...

Another way to do this is by soliciting the help of affiliate web pages. Businesses try to make affiliates by constantly reviewing products, articles, and services offered by other companies on their websites that could serve to complement the service or products to their own. This gives the other company greater impetus to provide links to the business because after all, it features their product. This also results in mutual referral, especially in the case of two complementary products.

Prior to canvassing a potential Web site to become your link partner, you should always be considering the suitability of the sites purpose. It would be counterintuitive to approach Webmasters who practice unethical seo techniques, who in the long run would do more harm for your site than good. It is also worth noting that prior to contacting a potential link partner, you should have some clearly defined benefits for why your prospect would want to link back to your site. As with any business transaction, people are more inclined to transact with you if they can see a direct benefit for them.

Make your site relevant and reputable for the best possible link building opportunities. Through effective link building, your business will cut through the clutter like a beacon in the night. Research your market, seek out possible link associations, offer that site owner a benefit for that Association and watch your site rise. I wish you all the best in business as in life.

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