SEO – A Three Step Process. Part Three
During step one I talked about how to find the best phrases to be found
for in the search engines. Step two discussed how to use these phrases on your
website in order to attract Google, Yahoo etc. Now in step three we will be
looking at how to use these same phrases to boost your rankings further by
doing a thing called link-building.
Link-building is an extremely important aspect of SEO. Done well, it
will boost your search engine results massively and done badly it will get you
ignored and even penalised.
A back-link is where your website is mentioned on somebody else’s
website and they have provided a hyperlink back to your website from their own.
A useful back-link is where the link is on the actual words you want to
be found for i.e. ‘accountants in
bristol’ rather than ‘click here’.
Every page on every website has a Google page rank. The page rank is the
measure of importance that Google place on that page rated from 0 – 10. The
higher the number the more important the page and all the better to get a link
from.
If the website has a similar theme to your own then this also counts
heavily. For instance, if you get a link from a blog that discusses finance and
tax affairs to your website for an accountant in Bristol then this counts more
heavily than from a blog discussing Rugby.
Links can be requested from other webmasters in return for a link from
your site. Social bookmarking, article and blogging sites are also excellent.
Very important to your SEO success is that the links are established
over a period of time and not instantly. Many services exist offering instant
links in return for very little money. These services are unlikely to bring you
much success and may also cost you by getting your site downgraded if they are
supplying multiple links from a ‘link farm’.
A link farm is hundreds and thousands of websites all hosted on the same
server with the sole purpose of providing links in return for money.
If it looks too good to be true then it probably is!
