Building good website links

Just having a good website is not enough.  There was a time when linking to everyone and them linking back to you (reciprocal links) was a good idea.  Link farms developed with the sole purpose of making the search engines think that yours was a popular website.

Google evolved to cater for this and many other 'black hat' marketing techniques and penalise those sites that were using this and other types of 'scam'.  White hat teqhniques are seen to be ethical and effective.

If you want your website to rank well and be trusted by search engines, then there are a number of ways this can be done using effective link strategies.

Idealy, you don't want all your visitors landing on your home page only then to start searching for what they were originally looking for - instead, if links are used for this purpose, you should be making contact with companies with trusted websites which are complementary to yours and suggesting to or asking them that they put a link in a relevant page on their website to point specifically to a page in your site.  

It is also good practice from within a particular page on your website to point to authority websites such as the BBC or Wikipedia for example for additional or supporting information to validate or explain more about what is on your page.  This shows a higher level of trust within Google and can help.

You should be using Google's PageRank (PR) feature to help you assess the trust value which Google has awarded you and to check the PageRank of sites you are considering exchanging links with.  Ideally, you want to be having inbound (sites linking to you) links from sites (and pages) that have an equal or greater PR than yours as this will strengthen your position.

The PageRank check feature is availble free by using the Google toolbar on your browser - If you don't use this toolbar, it can be downloaded here.  Installation is automatic and you can simply choose which features you want to use.

The Link Building process can take time to achieve results with but it is an effective exercise in making sure where possible that the links you are generating are effective, well placed, of value and can be used to greater effect overall in your website's continuing development.

To check your current links, go to Google and type in the search bar link:www.yoursite.co.uk and see what happens - you may be surprised at the results.

Depending on the type of business you have, link building may be something that you need to do only periodically or very regularly.