What Links Do For You

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 22 of March , 2008 at 2:04 pm

There are two things that good links do for your website. They’re both easy to measure and easy to accomplish, but it is time consuming to do it the right way.

Links can increase your search positioning - i.e. your rank in the search engines as part of your Search Engine Optimization. But it can also drive traffic to your website. Neither of these are really hard, but it can complicated trying to figure out what type of links you really need.

When it comes to traffic, there are two ways to think about it. You can go for quantity, in which case you simply try to get as many links as you can in as many places as you can. The danger with this is that you could get pegged as a spammer and your Search Engine Optimization benefits will decline. The upside is, if you do it right, you’ll get a lot of traffic. And you don’t necessarily need link juice in order to make this happen. Nofollow links work just as well as relevant links from high PageRank sites. If you are link building for traffic then don’t worry too much about the Search Engine Optimization.

On the other hand, to get the best links you’ll need to concentrate at least some of your efforts on building relevant links from high PageRank sites. By increasing your link popularity, you essentially are telling people that you are serious about building a brand. That link popularity will translate into higher search engine positions, which in turn leads to more traffic.

It makes sense, then, that if you want more traffic and higher search positioning then you’ll work on increasing the trust factor of your website and seek quality links. While quality is better than quantity, quantity is better than nothing and quality + quantity is best of all. So figure out a way to get as many really good links as you can and keep trying until you get it right.

Category: Inbound Links, Link Building

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