Last week, my colleague Emily posted a blog about link building and how it can help the search engine optimisation of your site, partly in reaction to Google talking about this on their own blog. The creation of multiple inbound links is something that we here at Vertical Leap work at quite a lot, and for good reason; it’s a powerful tool to drive traffic to your site.
There are, as is frequently the case, two parts to this. The most obvious is that links drive traffic to various parts of your site. This is fairly intuitive – the more roads that lead to a shopping centre, the more likely it is that people will make their way there.
The other side is a little more subtle and it concerns the way the Google creates its search ranking algorithm. Google has always made play of mimicking human behaviour to as great an extent as is possible and this is no exception. As part of their ongoing mission to bring the most useful content to its users, Google emphasises link clouds. Their theory, I believe, is that they are trying to create some sort of link cloud analogue of social interaction – in short, if a lot of people are talking about John Terry being awful in a pub, then it’s probably something that other people are thinking, too. The same for links – if lots of other sites are linking to you, then your site is seen as being more likely to be of use to people searching. Or, to use another metaphor – there are lots of signs for London, but fewer for Welwyn City Gardens Welwyn Garden City; if you’d never been to this country before, you’d assume that this ‘London’ place was the most important town in the country. And thus, it’s the same with links.
The upshot of this, really, is that it’s important to take a balanced approach to link building. Obviously, there’s no point in having a link just for the sake of having it – some sort of relevancy is vital – but creating multiple mentions is as important as having one loud voice shouting. Thus, working both streams at a time – both difficult, high value links and easier ones, too – will ultimately bring you ranking and traffic improvement.
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