Links

Posted on | February 10, 2011 | No Comments

Free SEO Tips – Links are an extremely important part of any SEO campaign, and getting links generally takes up most of the time, and budget of any SEO campaign. Onsite optimisation is something that can be done relatively quickly, but link building takes time, can be costly and is hard work.

Earlier posts have covered the different sources of links, this post is more about the type and quality of links. Link building is common sense….the most powerful and worthwhile links for you will come from very relevant and well established sites….and these tend to be the hardest to get! One thing to bear in mind with this is ‘follow’ and ‘no-follow’ links. ‘No-follow’ links were brought in by google as a way of letting people link to other sites without passing page rank (PR). To give a basic understanding – PR is a value google assigns to each web page, and this PR is passed to other web pages if there is a link off the page. In theory this means that from an SEO point of view, no follow links offer zero value…..however this does not mean you should avoid no follow links. Google likes to see ‘natural’ link building, and this would most definitely incorporate no-follow links, as such it is important to make sure you have mixture of no-follow, and follow links. Focus on the follow links, but make sure you are getting no follow links as well.

With link building make sure you bear in mind that search engines want to see natural link building. This however is hard to really define, would natural link building happen slowly over time? Or would it be more natural to see a lot of links appearing at one time due to a viral campaign? Either could occur in a natural way….so don’t worry too much. One thing that would seem obvious, is that if there are a lot of links appearing from non-relevant sites (and those sites also contain a high number of links to other sites that are non-related), it is clearly someone buying up links.

The fact is that nobody but the google engineers know exactly how they quantify and measure the value of links. Use your common sense, and generally avoid the quick fix, it will be a waste of time.

Comments