understanding search engine rankings and the importance of link building. In the past few years, thousands of “experts” have tried to crack the code to successful search engine rankings. However, most of them didn’t bother to sit back and actually observe the tactics used to rank high on search engines. If they had, they would have realized that all search engine ranking procedures are parallel to human interaction. Getting a website ranked high on a search engine is like making the effort to become more popular in real life. Are you confused? I hope you are, because then, this article will open your eyes to a whole new way of understanding search engine ranking and link building.
Do you remember your high school days? You had the popular crowd who were always surrounded by people. They already knew so many people, but more and more people wanted to become their friend. They were like people magnets. Were they always the best looking people or the smartest people? No, but they had a certain quality about them that attracted others to them. On the other hand, you had the nerds. These people were really smart and probably were a wealth of great information, but they were socially awkward and had few friends. When it came to election time, guess what, the popular people became class president and the smarter nerds were left alone and wondering what they’d have to do to become more popular. Well, it is now time for your website to become the class president.
If you Google “How many websites are created daily”, you won’t get any fixed answer. The estimates are in the thousands. Search engines cannot possibly keep up with this. So, they go through the index of the billions of sites in their database and see if any of these sites have a link to any other new website. This is the first step. This is how a search engine indexes a new site.
Now we come to step two. How does the search engine categorize your website? Is your site about sports or business, children or adults? Well, it looks at the site in its index and sees what that is about. It then screens the content of the new site. Based on the information it gets back, it categorizes the site. A good analogy to remember this takes you back to high school. Remember the “cool kids”? If they became friends with someone else, odds are that the someone else was a “cool kid” too. Similarly, the “nerds” stuck together in their own little social circle. Birds of a feather tend to flock together. So, if your website is about football, odds are that other football related websites will link to you.
So how do the search engines decide on the ranking of your website? This depends on 3 factors. The first is the ranking of the referring link, the second is the quality of content on your website and the third is the age of your website. Let’s go back to high school to better understand this. Let’s say a new student joins your tenth grade class and wants to be in the already packed football team. If the captain of the football team vouches for that guy, odds are that the coach will at least give the new guy a chance to try out for the team. Now, if a second grader who has never played football recommends the new guy for the team, odds are that the new guy won’t get a shot at the team. Similarly, search engines look at the quality of the referring website. If the website with the referring link is highly ranked and in the same category, the new website will be ranked higher. Therefore, links from a PR 5 or higher website are always good. Also, if the new website is about sports shoes, and the referring website is about Zebras, the link won’t be ranked high because the topics are not related. However if the referring website is about sports, guess what, you have a good back link.
Here is how you go about getting good quality back links?
- 1) Make sure your content is good. Or else no one will link to you.
- 2) Make a list of top websites in your category and ask them if they’d like to do a link exchange program with you.
- 3) Article marketing.
- 4) Blog and forum posting.
- 5) Social bookmarking on sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc.
- 6) Social networking on MySpace, Facebook etc.
- 7) Link up high ranking pages of your websites to low ranking or new pages.
Following the above strategies, your link building campaign will be off to a good start and search engines will not only rank you higher, but will do so faster as well.
However remember that like anything in life, link building should be a constant process. You don’t use good manners only when you first meet people, you use them constantly so that people are continuously impressed. Similarly, link building must be constant. Keep adding new content to your website and keep adding new links. If you keep at it, new pages of your site will be indexed faster and old pages will be indexed higher.
Link building is about building relationships with search engines and you always have to work at a relationship. Some of the most successful websites in the world have hundreds of thousands of links to them and these increase every day. Over time, you will notice that you get new links even without trying. If you have good content, people will want to link to your website. However, you have to do the ground work over a period of time to get to that stage.
This in a nutshell is link building. Good luck in making your website the new class president.
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