A website’s position in organic search results is vital for the success of business online. The closer your site is to the coveted number one position, the greater the likelihood of visitors clicking through to it.
Despite being a fundamental part of SEO, link building is often overlooked. Building high quality external links to a website is one of the most important steps to improving a site’s rankings within the search results and increasing the Google Page Rank.
Why are links important?
The term ‘linking’ can include directory submissions, article submissions, reciprocal links, one way back links, as well as internal linking – the linking between a website’s pages, which improve the structure of a website and the user journey. Anyone wishing to implement a linking campaign needs to ensure it is well planned and built gradually to appear natural to the search engines.
Links are used by search engines to determine the relevancy of a website for search terms. Building links from relevant websites ensures a site is indexed and ranked by search engines. In addition, links also act as a vote of confidence; the search engines view a website as an authority and a trustworthy source, which in turn improves rank position.
How many?
The number of links – and type of link – can be determined using a link counting tool, available from all major search engines. It provides an approximation of the links pointing to a website.
All search engines use a different method to crawl the internet, which means that information between these search engines often differs. Links may also take time to appear in these tools, as they have to be cached a number of times by the search engines before they are recognised as being permanent.
What is Google Page Rank?
The Google Page Rank (PR) calculation is a complex link analysis algorithm. In its simplest form, PR is Google’s calculation or score of a web page based on external and internal linking of a site. It also takes into account the on-page criteria of the web pages being linked to and from.
In some ways PR is related to link popularity, but the calculation is still dependent on the quality and strength of the links, not just the number of links to (and within) a site. The PR scale is between 0 and 10, so the higher the PR the better.
It’s always worth checking link numbers and the source site to ensure they are reputable. And remember that when it comes to building links, slow and steady always wins the race.
Lisa
