How Important are Incoming Links

If you have a Web site, you know that people need to be able to find it. In order for them to do that, you not only have to get the word out there but you also have to make people see that what you have is important when it comes to what they are looking for.

Inbound links can help raise your chances of getting a better ranking in the search engines, but only if they have relevance to your site and if they come from sites that are also high-ranking. Both of these things are important, and which one is more important is arguable. In the past it was believed that the page ranks of inbound links were more important than anything, but many of the larger search engines have since changed their algorithms.

With that being the case, the relevance of the sites that are giving you inbound links and the keywords that they use are becoming more significant than the page rank of the sites that offer the links. One thing is clear, however: getting inbound links to your site from relevant sites is crucial if you want to succeed and see your page rank rise.

Are Paid Links a Thing of the Past?

Paid links used to be ridiculously popular. They were all over the place. Now, however, it’s not nearly as popular and you see less people taking the paid link risk.

With the success of Google and the fact that so many people use that particular search engine, being in its rankings is extremely important. If Google sees something as ’spammy’ it’s a problem for the owner of the site, and that’s the main problem with paid links. They aren’t viewed favorably. As Google continues to devalue paid links, you’ll see less and less of them. There are certainly still people who are using them, but that doesn’t mean they’ll continue to in the future or that they’re having the success with them that they used to. Right now, however, Google is mostly targeting link sellers, so link buyers are still able to profit, to some degree, in some markets.

As long as Google doesn’t change the algorithm it has and the way that it’s search engine works, the paid links will never completely go away, because there are still ways for some people to continue to profit from them.

Is it Worth it To Purchase Links?

Yes. And no. It all depends on how much you’re paying for the links and what they’re doing for your site. It also depends on how open and honest you’re being, because buying links can be risky. It’s often seen as being very spammy, and the big search engines like Google don’t like that.

Links need to be legitimate to be out there on the Web, and buying them means that they aren’t legitimate at all. However, a lot of people do it and they get away with it for a long time without getting caught, so they must think it’s alright.

The bottom line is that there is risk with it, just like there is risk with anything that you do in the Website/link/SEO field. If you think that there’s too much risk, don’t do it. If you’re going to do it, be completely open and honest with your clients about it so that you can sleep at night. If something does go wrong, your clients will have been warned beforehand, so coming back on you is less likely.

Investigating Links Before Doing Business: Some Helpful Tips

Whether you fall on the more search-engine side of SEO or not, it’s helpful to know more about what you’re getting into, right?

We’ve seen it all before: a client’s website gets banned immediately after you greenlight them, and even though it wasn’t your fault, the timing is, let’s be honest, awful.

Normally, you try your best to improve aspects that are immediately within the client’s control. That’s just common sense of course. Most average to large websites have link equity they aren’t utilizing wisely, so naturally technical and structural stuff is normally investigated early on.

Let’s look at pre-sales due diligence. Our tactics for onsite investigation include:

1) Site querying to see how many indexed pages they have in relation to the actual size of the website;
2) Searching for our potential client’s keywords across the site;
3) On crucial pages, peeking at their source;
4) And of course, checking the site’s own linking structure.

For back links (off site), we do things like:

1) Optimizing anchor text on numerous occasions;
2) Sitewide links;
3) Shadow (hidden) links;
4) Sponsored links;
5) And last but certainly not least, links from low quality sites.

Using Games to Increase Your Link Building

One of the ways to increase your link building is through the use of games. These can be racing games, card games, or really any kind of game at all. Just keep it clean unless it fits with the subject of your site.

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