Creating link recognition is a single of the most crucial elements of search engine optimisation and also one of the most time-consuming. It amazes me that I nevertheless get numerous emails from so called Search engine optimisation experts inviting me to participate in link exchanges. Some of them even supplying to swap hyperlinks with a web-site totally unrelated to what we do! No wonder our sector comes beneath such fire.
Let’s go back to fundamentals and fully grasp the idea of linking. Linking in its simplest type is about taking a user on a stage in their online journey, whether it be to find a item, piece of news and information or to find out anything new. Now most of the time we know what we are seeking for on-line, so our session has a purpose, and with that target in mind we appear to trawl the net and put our trust in navigating about web-sites till we accomplish our aim. Often it can take minutes and a straight forward visit to a search engine and a location website, other times it can requires us hours, with a journey that requires us in and out of a quantity of distinctive sites.
Now if you retain that notion in mind when thinking about link developing you will soon realise that the ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ approach to developing hyperlink popularity is fundamentally flawed. Hyperlinks should really be awarded on merit and not by way of back scratching.
Seeking out link exchanges is an inefficient use of your time
What I am going to tell you subsequent is going to transform the way you method building link reputation. Let’s take a appear at a classic hyperlink swap situation. You first of all spend a couple of days searching for web pages that have hyperlink swap directories on their internet site. You make contact with the webmaster explaining that you would like to engage in a link exchange. The webmaster agrees to link to you as soon as you have placed a hyperlink back to his web page first. You set up the link and e mail the webmaster. You check out the site to verify your hyperlink and you obtain your hyperlink buried deep inside the website on a web page that has a low web page rank and surrounded by 50 other net hyperlinks. You then repeat the process with a different internet site. Now right here comes the killer, you have spent all that time constructing up these hyperlinks, a couple of months later you return to some of the site’s exactly where your hyperlink was placed and you uncover that some of them have been removed. You get in touch with the webmasters and ask them why your link has been removed. They get back to you and inform you it was an accident. Yeh proper, they removed the hyperlink deliberately so they could gain a one way link from you. After a couple of months has passed you notice that your link reputation has not increased in Google – so again you revisit some of the web pages that have been linking to you and verify your links (or by now you may have bought some link checking application to do that for you). You see that your links are still there, but you have study that often webmaster’s adopt sneaky approaches to avoid the search engine spiders from following the hyperlink. Low and behold you see within the source code of one particular web page that they are employing a “nofollow” tag on the hyperlink.
Now tell me is all this effort worth it? Link exchanges open up a new can of worms for you – coming into get in touch with with black hat SEOs!
Now think about the opposite. Why not commit the time on building compelling content material or interactive tools that individuals will naturally want to link to. Not only are they likely to give you with a link from a web page that is likely to be visited, but it will be a a single way link, and a few 1 way hyperlinks from respected web sites are worth a lot more than 50 reciprocals, take my word for it. Plus you will have anything of genuine value on your internet site that visitors will use and might even tell other people today about. With this strategy to link building you will generate extra ‘noise’ about your website and encourage other site owners to link to you, simply because you’ll have some thing on your personal website, that will be of interest to their own guests.
With hyperlink constructing it is much better to believe about building a name for your self and focus on developing your on the internet reputation as opposed to expanding your list of reciprocal hyperlink partners. So dark web onion is clear: ‘quality over quantity’ is what counts when it comes to developing hyperlink reputation.