The Importance of Link Building

The more sites that link to your website, the more important your site is believed to be by the search engines. The more sites that link in improves the page rank of each page in the site. Link building is the process by which other sites are encouraged to link in to yours. As other websites link in the "link popularity" increases. As the link popularity increases the search engines will interpret this as your site more important. This in turn should help to drive more traffic to your we site.

The process of link building is a time consuming task, many websites rank poorly with search engines for this reason, link building is too time consuming. Link building is not an overnight process, it is a long term process.

Google Page Rank

Probably the most popular search engine on the internet is Google. Google uses an algorithm to measure the pagerank of each page at each of it's data centres. The pagerank is measurement between 0 and 10, 10 being the most important (which Google assigns to itself). Many websites have a pagerank of 1 or 2, the more popular, and best linked sites have a higher rank of between 7 and 10.

In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support, it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page. The algorithm that Google uses to determine it's pagerank is:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

• PR(A) - Page rank of the target page
• PR(Tn) - Page rank for each page contributing towards the page rank of the target page.
• C(Tn) - Each page spreads its vote out evenly amongst all of it’s outgoing links. THis is the number of outgoing links from the contributing page
• d - Damping factor. All these fractions PR(Tn)/C(Tn) of votes are added together. To stop the other pages having too much influence, this total vote is “damped down” by multiplying it by 0.85 (the factor “d”). The (1 – d) at the beginning is a bit of probability math magic so the “sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one”: it adds in the bit lost by the d(.... It also means that if a page has no links to it (no backlinks) even then it will still get a small PR of 0.15 (i.e. 1 – 0.85).

Quality Links

Search engines are not simply looking for the number of links that point to a website, but the number of quality links. The most important part of this process is obtaining quality links. Quality links have 2 parts to them;

1. Links from website that possess a high Page Rank. Obtaining a link from a website with a high Page Rank is best, although any site with 1 or above is beneficial
2. Links from websites that are associated with the industry in which you do business.

Although it is best to get links from higher pagerank sites, incoming links from pages with no, or 0 pagerank should not ne discounted as these could be the high pagerank sites of the future.

Finding Links

One of the best ways to advance your link popularity is to offer quality and informative content to your visitors and hope for natural links. If they find the information interesting enough, they will naturally link their website to your own.

No time to find links? Too much trouble? As part of our Virtual Webmaster service we will find links on your behalf. In addition we will take care of other webmaster roles.