Links to Your Website

Written by: Gary Horsman

The Importance of Links to Your Website

A Website Needs In-Coming Links to Rank High In Search

This blog post will focus on the importance of links to your website. First off you need to realize that and estimated 75% of Google’s process looks at the links coming into your website pages from other websites. Google studies the link profile of your site and all its pages and ranks sites and pages higher that have a better link profile.

A linking profile is a summation of all the links and the qualities of all the links, both internal and external, for every page on your site. A link profile is vital if you want to be presented high in search position in a competitive marketplace.

The most important factor to ranking high in Google search results is the quantity and quality of links to your website.

Thousands of web directories exist that can establish links to websites. So many of them exist that the value of links from directories has diminished. Google and the other major search engines do not count them as valuable. Moreover, the process to find directories and then to submit your website to them is time consuming. Also, be sure to have an e-mail that you use just for directory submissions as you can expect to get quite a bit of extra mail after even a few submissions.

Links to Your Website That Can Help

Something that you can try to help gain in-coming links is to create free online business profiles. Some of these profile listings may even appear above the regular search results. You can also ask customers for positive user reviews on some of these business profile sites.

This is an activity worthy of your time.

Beware the “No Follow” Link

One important purpose to getting links to your site is to build your popularity in the eyes of search engines. It is important to know that websites can tell search engines to ignore a specific link by adding an extra tag in the link code, called “nofollow”.

Why would a site do this?

Here is an example. To get a link to your site from Wikipedia would be a great link. Also, the content text on Wikipedia.org is completely controlled by the general public. This looks like an easy and important link to get. You could write an article about your company or product or service and post it on Wikipedia. However, it is not quite that easy.

The organization of Wikipedia wants users to post valuable content to its site, and not a bunch of self-promoting links. By adding nofollow tags to links that are external to Wikipedia it demotivates people to write self-serving content with a bunch of self-serving links. Look at any external link on Wikipedia and you will quickly see the “rel = no follow” code.

Before you spend time trying to get a link from another website, do a quick check to make sure it is not using nofollow tags. When you are on a webpage (preferably the page where you want your link to appear), click with the right side of your mouse (Mac users hold Ctrl when you click) and then select View Source or View Page Source. Look for the links.

If you see more than a couple instances of nofollow, then a link from that webpage is worthless in helping your search rank position and you will not gain search engine position value from that site. The site may still provide you with human traffic so make a decision to request a link based on what’s good for your business.

If you want to learn more about linking and how we can help build high-quality keyword phrase links into your site then give us a call at 802-457-9799.