Building Relevant Links

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An important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is link building. This involves the process of getting other websites to link to yours. The more links to your site the better the ranking of your site in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Its important to note that the better the quality of these links the more weight they will have in determining results.

Building links takes time, building quality links takes longer. Building quality links is a vital part of SEO. Many site owners don't have the time to fulfill this lengthy time consuming task. A genuine link building campaign requires endurance as it is constantly ongoing and evolving. The search engines search algorithms are changing all the time so must the optimization techniques.

Back link quality is determined by the relevancy and content of the site providing the link. What this means is the site providing the link is within the same niche / theme of site that is being linked to. So one recruitment site to another recruitment or job site would be relevant.

Its also important to:
  • Link from pages that have the right link context.
  • Page title of the linking site is relevant to the destination link.
  • The anchor text has relevance, not just “Click Here”
  • PageRank of the site providing the link to be above PR1, above PR4 even better!
  • .gov.uk, .ac.uk, or .org.uk sites appear carry more weight than other domain extensions.
If a page is supplying a link to your site imagine that page as a bucket of water. Each link coming out of that page is a hose coming from the bucket draining PR or as in the example water. The more links from the page to other sites the more water is lost from the bucket. Its widely accepted that its better to have a page linking to you with fewer links to other sites. This way there is more PR / weighting towards your site.

Remember relevant links carry more weight than none relevant links. A site with high PR linking to your site will mean less than a site with lower PR linking but being a lot more relevant to your site. Link building takes time, is hard work and lets be honest boring. But as your links grow so will your sites visitors and in turn revenue.