Link Building - It's Like A Word Of Mouth Recommendation Online

A word of mouth recommendation is the oldest, most compelling and powerful form of marketing in the world.

If a friend or colleague recommends a TV programme, restaurant – or in business, a managed search engine optimisation agency - then the chances are, you will follow their advice and investigate it further.

When you think about it, the entire web is built on the basis of links and the same principle applies. When a trusted site links to yours, people will follow that recommendation and visit your website.

A successful link building strategy will bring a stream of qualified sales prospects to your door who genuinely wish to find out more about your services and products. Strategic links will raise the profile of your website and your brand within your particular industry and earn you serious competitive advantage.

And it gets better. Because website popularity is an important criteria that search engines apply to websites and thus where yours appears in their results. That trusted website linking to your site is judged as being a vote of confidence and will add to the overall score, or rating that a search engine applies to your website.

Search engines have also begun to rank the importance of the sites that link to yours. A relevant link from a well known company is worth more to you than a minor player. Search engines also evaluate the text contained in the link that is pointing to your website. For instance, if the words in the link contain relevant keywords, then again, this adds credibility to your site.

For instance Google apply their PageRank system to all the sites that appear in their results. The higher the ranking, the better regarded that site is.

Link popularity is still an undervalued aspect of effective search engine marketing. Some devotees, or Link Mongers as they call themselves, even argue that as competition becomes ever more fierce for keywords and phrases, rich links are as important as good content.

But like many aspects of search engine marketing, there are dangers inherent to successfully acquiring links with just anybody. So called link farms have sprung up offering Free For All (FFA) links to websites in the hope of increasing their popularity. In fact, many search engines will penalize websites they find with rogue links such as these by dropping their rankings or in extreme cases, dropping that site altogether.

Google’s recent ‘Florida Dance’ saw thousands of websites which had enjoyed top ranking positions and all the financial advantages associated with that, suddenly drop these valued positions overnight. Many experts believe that suspect linking was a deciding factor in Google changing its algorithms or the criteria it applies when judging websites that caused such a ccatastrophic situation for so many companies.

Of course the most tragic side to this is that many owners and managers of the websites that suffered had no idea their site was in breach of search engine code and would have been devastated when they were suddenly dropped.

Unfortunately, some search engine optimisation companies will look at short cuts to boost popularity, but of course, once the damage is done, their client companies can do nothing about it.

Vertical Leap believes the best way to build long term popularity is quite simply to offer good content that is useful and adds value for your target audience. Good content and targeted links go hand in hand: on one level effective links will draw motivated visitors to your site and reward them with what they are looking for (good content); at the same time the better the content on your site, the more worthwhile companies will want to establish links with you.

Of course seeking out and securing links is a very time consuming process. Part of Vertical Leap’s Managed Search Engine Service is to investigate and secure suitable links on your behalf. Clients can also rest assured that as Vertical Leap applies search engine marketing to the highest standards of ethics, the pitfalls associated with link building such and linking with irrelevant sites and link farms will be avoided at all costs.

Vertical Leap offers its clients a variety of convenient ways to set up links, whilst at
the same time managing the entire process.