If you are here it is because you found us on Google, which is what Train4SEO is about. If you are interested in training, please e.mail info@train4SEO.com
Link Building:-
Why links are used to identify where a web page should be listed in a search engine.
When search engines were not as widely used (by Joe Public) as they are today, they were designed for and mainly used by many academics and academic institutions to ‘find relevant material’. A typical search engine was/is Hotbot. University library’s list the various search engines and identify which are best for particular material etc.
Relevant information is seen as knowledgeable information from a reputable source, e.g. a University.
In the early days ‘of the internet’ there were as many quacks as doctors putting medical information on web pages.
How could a search engine tell the difference? The reputable academic work would be referenced in other pieces of works (‘The References at the end of a paper’). These were identified by the search engines as ‘links’ to the main paper. In academia, the more times a piece of work is referenced, the more important it is seen to be. This appears to be indisputable. Writers of 'papers' can see how many times their paper has been referenced.
Why Link Build? –
If an academic has written a paper even though it may a brilliant paper, not one will reference it unless the academic goes to some effort to let people know about it. Therefore a lot of effort is put into publishing it in a well known journal, where it can be widely seen and then, if it is a good paper, references and links will follow. The academic will also travel and try to have the paper included in conferences.
If you have a good site which lots of people will want to see, then you have to do the same – let people know about it, and then they will put links to it. That’s why you need to ‘link build’
Should you try to just ‘put links to your site’ and hope it will have the same result? No,
Any reference to an academic paper from another academic paper is meaningful if the second paper is also ‘highly rated’. An article by a ‘quack’ saying you can cure a disease by eating frogs legs and ‘chanting’ and being referenced by an equally meaningless source e.g. (on page 30 of a google search) counts for nothing.
If your site has a lot of meaningless links, it will be rated lower not higher.
A scientific article about chemistry will be rated by references in other chemistry journals and papers. Similarly a reference to the scientific article in a holiday guide, or a guide to good food in Morocco would not impress fellow scientists, and therefore would be meaningless. Therefore if your site is about babies, don’t try to put links on sites which have nothing to do with babies.
No-Follow Tags.
What are they and where are they, and how do you find out if they are there?
People tried to fool the search engine spiders by putting lots of links in blogs and other meaningless low value reference sources. A low value reference source is comparable to ---If you want some one to read how good your cuisine is – then you would like it to be written about in ‘The good food guide’, and written by a well known and respected person.
Comments on your cuisine by someone writing comments on a piece of paper and putting it (unsigned or with a made up name) on a notice board would be meaningless. Initially spiders came across lots of these meaningless reference sources as blogging became more widely used, so ‘no-follow’ tags were automatically put on as many blogs as possible. These are put immediately before and after a link. As soon as a spider sees a no-follow tag, it does not follow that link, - there may be exceptions ---please ask the author---
You can see if your links have no-follow tags by using right clicking on the link in Mozilla Firefox and choosing inspect element. If inspect element does not show up, ask us using our contact form.
Keywords and meta tags
When academic material was put in electronic form, the early search engines just looked for the ‘keywords’ that the writers of the papers chose. This was because early search engines could not handle more than this, --and it worked.
Therefore when search engines started to trawl through web pages, meta tags were used. A paper with poor keywords would not be found very often by people doing keyword searches. The same applies to meta tags.
Proper keywords would optimise the chances of the paper being found by search engines when keyword searches were done.
For a web page to be found easily and therefore appear on page one of Google, it needs to be optimized in a similar way.
Is it worth all the time and effort to ensure that your site has a lot of relevant links
Why should I spend so much time optimising my site, is it worth the effort, why not just pay for advertising. If you have loads of money, do this, pay for advertising. If you don’t have loads of money, then it is said (I can’t guarantee this figure is correct) -- Search Engines generate about 75% of traffic to a site –but only if the site is set up correctly and optimised. If the site is not search engine friendly, then search engines will not generate traffic to the site. The number of purchases in a site is often directly related to the number of people who visit the site. Double the number of people visiting the site and you double the number of sales.
Moving higher up the results page
The more relevant your site is to the ‘query’ (keyword you type into Google) the higher up the results page you will appear. This will be clarified later.
We are happy to answer any of your questions about link building, just email us -- info@train4seo.com
This article is copyright. June 2009