Whilst scouring the world of Search Engine Optimisation, there is no doubt in my mind that you have come accross a term called 'link building' amidst other terms such as Meta Descriptions, Title Tags and Sitemaps. Let's start with the basics. First of all, link building is known as an 'off-page' search engine optimisation technique - which I am hoping is self explanitory - and is also known to be one of the most influential factors which decipher where your website ranks for a paricular key term.

Link building is in its basic form gaining a one way link from a third party website which links back to your website and is seen as a 'vote' or 'recommendation' by major search engines for your website, with the text within that link, known as the anchor text, being the keyword for which you are being recommended for.

As an example, here is a link for the BBC Sports page - we are providing a one way link back to the BBC entitled 'Sport' - the link is below.

Sport

The above link will be cached by search engines and they will assume that we are recommending that the BBC be recommended for the keyword 'sport'. The more recommendations or votes for a keyword on a particular website, the more chance you will find it higher in SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages).

There is however, a question of quality. There are numerous different opinions surrounding Quality VS Quantity when it comes to inbound links for a website and we sit very proudly on the Quality side of the fence. Here's why.

Imagine Google's spam team, there are hundreds of people dedicated to quality control when it comes to serving up Google's results pages. Google strive for the results to be of the best quality and match the user's search query with ultimate precision and in order for them to do that, they need to look at serving up what they think to be quality websites.

A way of measuring this is looking at what backlinks a particular site has, where do the backlinks come from? Do they look like you have purchsed links from them? Where on the page is the link positioned? How many other outbound links are on the page? How old is the domain? There are numerous variables - so on the proof of that, we recommend sourcing quality link partners. It will pay off.

Posted: 03/08/10 13:24