As someone who is interested in Search Engine Optimisation, you have probably heard how important back links are as part of your SEO Campaign. When a search user enters their criteria into the search engine the search engine has to be able to return the best results to gain the trust of the user. It does this by evaluating which pages relate to that query and which are most important.
Importance is determined by ‘votes’ and each link back to a page is seen for a vote for that page. However, links do not just ‘come’ to sites. You have to publish great content that people want to link to, so you need to shout about it (try using social media channels such as Digg and Twitter to start with).
One thing to consider is that you get links from relevant web pages. Dont just go buying links from ‘link farms’. Carefully source your web sites / pages and if possible get them from pages with relevant content to your own. Naturally, links are valuable so dont expect people to just give them away!
Moving forward, each link to your page, or vote, passes a part of the page rank of the origin. So if you get a link back from a web page with a high page rank (and few links) you will get a higher slice of the source ranking. If your source page is cluttered with links then you will get a smaller slice of the pie.
However, if only it was as simple as just getting a slice of the pie. There are now two other factors that Google has thrown into the mix.
However, it has gotten more complicated by the introduction of 2 new factors:
1. Relevance. If the link comes from a site that is on the same topic as the publisher’s site (or a closely related topic), that link is worth more than a links that comes from a site with an unrelated topic.
2. Authority. It is generally accepted that search engines attempt to measure how much they trust a site. If a site is highly trusted, its vote will count for more than if it is not that trusted.
These factors are the two single most important items you need to consider when building your back links. Back links from bad neighbourhoods may provide you with a quick fix, but it wont be long until you find your site sliding down the listings.
So why does link building matter? Done correctly, It helps your site gain page rank, and most importantly trust from the right neighbourhoods.
