Making Sense of Search Engine Optimization and Link Building

Most business owners and web design clients have an easy time understanding why inbound links are such an important part of Google’s algorithm. After all, if lots of other websites are pointing in your direction, then it only makes sense to consider your site a top resource in the industry.

What they don’t often realize is that the relative value of inbound links goes deeper than that. It isn’t enough to simply have links to your website, they need to be the right kinds of links from the right places.

To help you make sense of search optimization and link building, here are three quick things to keep in mind:

Having other sites link to you is a big deal. Having just a few dozen high-quality inbound links to your website can help your Google position more than anything you could actually change or optimize on your own pages. In other words, Link building is one part of the search engine optimization process you can’t afford to overlook.

To be valuable, an inbound link has to make sense contextually. In other words, Google and the other major search engines put more weight and links that come from sites that are related to yours. Having vendors, suppliers, and industry directories point you is valuable; gathering random links from sites on unrelated topics isn’t.

You have to ask for links in a way that makes sense to other business owners and webmasters. Just because an inbound link would really help your online marketing efforts will doesn’t mean that someone else is likely to give it to you. Instead of simply requesting that people link to your site, point them towards a piece of interesting content or some other feature that will benefit their readers and followers.

Link building for SEO purposes is a big topic but understanding the basics of what the major search engines want to see is your first step towards climbing the rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Take what you know and work with your business web design team to make sense of your inbound link building strategy.