Strategic Linking

Strategic linking is one of the most important and powerful aspects of an optimized website. While most companies focus on link popularity alone, our extensive experience with linking has lead us to divide strategic linking into 3 categories. These include link popularity, internal linking, and external linking. These are described below. Just like the optimization of a website's structure, content and other on-page factors, strategic linking, especially link popularity is a labour intensive activity requiring a lot of patience. The fact that it makes up 50% of a proper SEO campaign clearly makes it very important.

Taking advantage of the links that lead to your website is called link popularity optimization and it's ranked among the top adjustments required to attract search engine traffic. Link popularity is the most common type of linking. Essentially, the more popular the websites that link to your site, the more popular your site will become. It's a popularity contest in the real world and the same holds true for the virtual world. Now the hard part! Where can you find high quality links? How can one differentiate between sites that have worthwhile links and those that are just wasting your time and money? We have an effective, unique approach in how we make that determination. We do not believe in automated software since those are frequently rendered obsolete by the search engines. Moreover, software could never provide the long term benefits that a person could offer. Link Building Campaigns We can implement a link popularity campaign on your behalf. We offer affordable link building packages and do not lock clients into 12 or 18 month contracts. There are multiple ways to get links to point into a website and we can provide the options to you. Please contact us to learn more about our award winning link building approaches. If you are a webmaster, we can teach you to make educated and informed choices through our search engine optimization consulting or search engine optimization training.

Linking within a site is an often over-looked yet very important part of strategic linking. This is especially true for larger websites. Have you noticed that when you search for a particular website, the homepage frequently comes up first? One reason for this has to do with internal linking. Internal linking involves the links across pages within the website itself. There are a number of ways to harness that aspect of the optimization process and bring more power to the website.

Some search engines take into account what sites your site is linking to. External links (or outbound linking) is important for several reasons. First, it may affect Google PageRank (read more about Google PageRank in the SEO and Web Articles section).

Next, if your website links to other websites with similar themes, search engines get the message that your site is made up of a particular topic which can help your rank. The problem is that you do not necessarily want to link to too many other websites. We can explain the reasons and comeplxities behind external links and related linking strategies.

Finally, if your website links to websites that are not in the “for all” category such as adult-oriented content, your website may be downgraded in the search engine results. This point leans somewhat to the extreme but it is a possibility. As search engines become increasingly more refined, these issues are becoming more prominent. For example, while Google will list “adult websites” in their results, they are typically at the very bottom of the list of results, showing more “legitimate” websites first.

Once you have figured out how to get links into your site, link within your site, and which links to other sites that you would consider placing on your site, you have to consider another important point: Link type. Is the link to your site or within your site graphic image? Is it text? Is the text or graphic image created in Macromedia Flash (which search engines can't read)? There are many similar questions beyond these which must be considered. We can help you make informed choices that will lead to proper strategic linking within the optimization and traffice generating process. Contact us to get more information and to start your link building today!