Developing hyperlink popularity is a single of the most significant components of search engine optimisation and also one particular of the most time-consuming. It amazes me that I nonetheless receive numerous emails from so named Search engine optimization experts inviting me to participate in hyperlink exchanges. Some of them even providing to swap links with a site entirely 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 locate a item, piece of news and facts or to study a thing new. Now most of the time we know what we are hunting for on line, so our session has a goal, and with that goal in thoughts we look to trawl the net and place our trust in navigating about web-sites till we reach our goal. In some cases it can take minutes and a straight forward go to to a search engine and a destination internet site, other instances it can requires us hours, with a journey that takes us in and out of a number of diverse internet websites.
Now if you maintain that concept in thoughts when pondering about link constructing you are going to soon realise that the ‘you scratch my back, I will scratch yours’ strategy to building link reputation is fundamentally flawed. Links should really be awarded on merit and not by means of back scratching.
Searching for out hyperlink exchanges is an inefficient use of your time
What I am going to inform you subsequent is going to transform the way you method creating link recognition. Let’s take a appear at a classic link swap scenario. You very first of all commit a few days seeking for web-sites that have hyperlink swap directories on their web site. You contact the webmaster explaining that you would like to engage in a hyperlink exchange. The webmaster agrees to hyperlink to you after you have placed a link back to his web page initial. You set up the hyperlink and e-mail the webmaster. You go to the site to check your link and you obtain your link buried deep within the internet site on a web page that has a low page rank and surrounded by 50 other web hyperlinks. Official hidden wiki repeat the procedure with one more internet site. Now right here comes the killer, you have spent all that time developing up these links, a handful of months later you return to some of the site’s where your hyperlink was placed and you come across that some of them have been removed. You get in touch with the webmasters and ask them why your hyperlink has been removed. They get back to you and tell you it was an accident. Yeh correct, they removed the hyperlink deliberately so they could achieve a one way link from you. Right after a few months has passed you notice that your hyperlink reputation has not enhanced in Google – so once more you revisit some of the web sites that were linking to you and verify your hyperlinks (or by now you may possibly have purchased some link checking software to do that for you). You see that your links are still there, but you have study that from time to time webmaster’s adopt sneaky procedures to prevent the search engine spiders from following the hyperlink. Low and behold you see inside the source code of 1 web site that they are employing a “nofollow” tag on the hyperlink.
Now inform me is all this effort worth it? Hyperlink exchanges open up a new can of worms for you – coming into make contact with with black hat SEOs!
Now consider the opposite. Why not spend the time on making compelling content or interactive tools that men and women will naturally want to hyperlink to. Not only are they likely to give you with a hyperlink from a page that is probably to be visited, but it will be a 1 way hyperlink, and a few 1 way links from respected websites are worth a lot more than 50 reciprocals, take my word for it. Plus you will have some thing of actual worth on your internet site that guests will use and may possibly even inform other men and women about. With this strategy to hyperlink building you’ll generate more ‘noise’ about your web-site and encourage other website owners to link to you, since you are going to have one thing on your own website, that will be of interest to their own visitors.
With hyperlink creating it really is improved to consider about constructing a name for oneself and concentrate on developing your on the web reputation as opposed to developing your list of reciprocal link partners. So the message is clear: ‘quality over quantity’ is what counts when it comes to developing link popularity.