Link building is one of the most important Spartanburg SEO activities, from the standpoint of achieving high search page rankings for your website for the long term. Unfortunately for most
business owners, it’s also perhaps the most complex and confusing! No blogpost could adequately explain all of the ins and outs of link building, but an overview in the form of an onion can help. Starting at the outside, go with us as your SEO expert in Spartanburg, SC peels back the layers of this important and constantly changing SEO technique.
It’s a mistake to rely on weak, poorly built links!
The Outer Layer: Link Building Basics
A one-sentence summary of link building would go something like this: The more links that a web page has incoming from other sites, and the more links that page has outgoing to other sites, the higher the search engines value the page. The premise behind this value system is that people will only generate links to a web page if the page provides them with valuable, helpful information. Thus a link is a convenient signal about page quality, and the more links, the higher the page’s quality probably is.
Beyond the Basics
If all Spartanburg SEO topics could be explained in a short sentence, Internet marketing would be much easier! Of course, there are plenty of qualifications that we must make to our one-sentence summary. When Google began relying on links to determine page quality, web designers came up with all kinds of ways to generate hundreds of links that were not organic—that is, they were created solely for the purpose of boosting search results and did not reflect page quality at all. Today, the algorithms have largely caught up with such practices, and you can’t really get away with outdated methods such as:
- Paying people to post links to your website
- Trading links—generating links to another website in return for links to yours
- Registering with a directory site whose only purpose is to be a source of links
- Owning multiple websites and producing links between them
Other “Bad Links”
There are other kinds of links that can hurt your web pages rather than help them on the search engines. For instance, if your Spartanburg SEO consultant is conducting a banner ad campaign for your company, those ads will obviously be linked to your website. However, if Google “sees” those links, it will assume that you are trying to pay for links to benefit your pages instead of getting them organically. It’s best to keep your paid ads and your organic link building efforts separate by using the “nofollow” tool. This tool lets your Spartanburg SEO expert tell Google that it should not consider that particular link when ranking the quality of your web page.
What About People?
As we get closer to the core of link building, we shift from a focus on search engines to a focus on actual human visitors. After all, your ultimate goal is to get people onto your website! Links to your web pages on trusted, high profile websites are some of the best tools available for attracting new visitors. If a website links to your recent blogpost as a good source of information, people will be inclined to follow the link, get introduced to you, and even share the link with others as well. And that brings us to the core of the “link onion:”
The Core: Great Content
The outer layers of link building can’t hold together unless they are anchored in great web page content. Don’t bother trying to get other websites to link to you unless you really have something useful to offer your visitors. Even if your Spartanburg SEO company can successfully generate a number of links and temporarily push your page up in the search results, once people click through to the page, they will quickly realize that they are wasting their time there. The high “bounce rates”—the speed with which visitors turn around and leave your page—will hurt your pages more than the inbound links will help it.
As with so many Spartanburg SEO topics, solid, useful, attractive, and carefully composed content is the foundation on which link building efforts depend. Contact us for more information on this complex but highly beneficial activity.
