How Important Is Link Building?

At Eskdale, when developing a web marketing strategy, we often get asked this question; the answer is quite simply that link building is one of the most important considerations when developing a web marketing campaign.

There is no easy route to effective link building, and I was interested to read Dr Dave Chaffey's blog earlier today; two of the most common questions he is asked are:

"How do I get more links?" quickly followed by, "is there a quicker way of doing it?"

Dave goes on to say "Quite often clients expect link building to be something you outsource or there is a "tool" that does it for you. Unfortunately this is far from the case".

Why is link building important?
In simplistic terms, Google sees a link to your website as a vote or endorsement of your website by others; the more votes you have from trusted websites the more smartie points you get in Google's ranking algorithm. Of course good web design matters, if the website is badly optimized or poorly built this will also have a negative effect but if two comparable websites are matched; one with lots of trusted links and one with very few, the one with most good quality links will rank above the one with very few.

How do I get links?
There are a number of routes but at all costs avoid link farms; we've all seen the adverts Get 1000 links for £20 or some equally ludicrous offer - ignore them at best these are links from low grade un-trusted websites which will potentially have no effect on your rankings but the more likely scenario is that these links create a negative effect.

Some suggested options:

• Create compelling content - you can do this through blogging & writing articles - make the content on you website something that people will want to read and if the content is good enough people will link to it.
• Directory submissions - there are many thousands of good directories, DMOZ is of course the most well known
• Forum Marketing - find forums that focus on your sphere of interest and participate, contribute and engage with these people - many will be your type of customer

In future posts we will discuss methods of distinguishing the valuable links from the less valuable but if followers have any burning questions, post them online.

Posted by Dan at 03/12/2010 12:04:00