One of the keys to search engine optimisation is linking. Linking to and from other sites is imperative in order for search engines to regularly find your site. Once a site is listed in a search engine, it is not enough to ensure your site gets regularly visited and updated. The search engine will rely on links from other sites to yours to ensure your site is updated.

In Google’s case, linking is essential. It is commonly agreed that Google gives a great deal of weight to links, especially inbound linking, which is when someone has a link to your site from another site. These inbound links not only provde Google with a means of finding your site, but Google counts the number of inbound links to your site and gives your overall ranking a weighting accordingly via it’s allocation of Page Rank. (See section on Page Rank)

Inbound links are an essential component of achieving Google Page Rank. Google’s crawler Googlebot will not only count the number of inbound links to your site but also ranks the importance of each link according to the Page Rank of the site where the link is placed and the relevance of the site to your own content. On these principles it is generally agreed that it is not how many links you have to your site but more importantly the quality of the links. A small number of high quality links from sites that have a high relevance and high Google Page Rank will be much more beneficial than a link farm of hundreds of manufactured links.

The other major SEs like Yahoo and MSN, may also give extra weighting for inbound links, but it is generally thought that they do not base their rankings as heavily on linking as Google.

At ANSO we can help with your website link strategy. Linking is a major priority with our ongoing Off-Page SEO campaigns. Develop your website to it's full potential and maximise your exposure with search engines. Long term growth is the key to a successful website.

Contact us to discuss your requirements.