LINK BUILDING – SEO’S taking a cautious approach

Search Engine Optimization techniques rely on a host of factors to ensure ranking of a website on search engines. Among these tactics are placing the right keywords in the content of the website, which could be picked up by search engine when a user keys in the keyword, thereby ensuring traffic. Traffic to a website translates into revenue. Another tactic is to create links to other websites, thereby ensuring a good rank on the search engine. SEO techniques use refined link analysis, thereby ensuring that search engines find out how the pages are related to each other.

Since the late 1990′s search engines have been using links as a measure of the popularity of the website. Though links themselves do not generate page ranking, but SEO experts point to an engine’s algorithm attaching importance to links. By analyzing links search engines gauge the popularity of a website or a webpage on the number of pages linked to the website. A trustworthy site would have a healthy number of links while a spam site would receive very few links.

Given the focus of algorithms is on the analysis of the links, increasing the links of a website are becoming crucial in gaining attention from search engines. For a qualified SEO expert link building is one of the high priority areas to ensure higher rank and increased traffic.

A site like Wikipedia has many links because of its trustworthiness and typically gets a higher ranking on a search engine.

Ensuring Healthy number of links

Natural Links

Some links do not require any action on the part of an SEO expert. The website creating worthy content and the capability to highlight it through awareness makes these links invaluable to companies.

Manually Building Links

Here the SEO’s job is to popularise the website by inviting bloggers for links by sending emails, presenting sites to directories, paying to get a listing. The SEO tries to sell the website to the target by attaching a value proposition to the site, namely how this site would enable a win-win situation.

Self-Creation

A staggering number of websites use visitors entering their sites to get them to blog comments, put up user profiles, sign guest books, etc. in an effort to increase the links to the website. But nowadays search engines are frowning on these practices and in some cases are penalizing these websites which pursue these links. These links are nowadays considered spam and should not be pursued diligently by SEO’s.

Ever since Google launched its algorithm dubbed Penguin in an effort to rank genuine websites and drastically reduce the number of spam sites (which depend on keyword stuffing and providing back links to generate rankings), to ensure a better user experience. Building links has come under the scanner and hence is being pursued with a lot of caution and trepidation by SEO experts. Only link building in genuine websites are being promoted for getting higher ranking and the practice of providing back links has come down drastically among SEO experts.