You’ve implemented the right keywords on your website, bought your Google AdWords and improved your meta-tags. You think you’ve covered all your bases, and now expect to come up first in search. Not so fast.

“Solid link popularity can literally make or break a site with the search engines.”
- SearchEngineWatch.com

To rank high in search results – and therefore get traffic to your website – you need as many quality links pointing to your website as possible. It is absolutely crucial to your SEO strategy.

“Link building” is the process of creating inbound links to your website; i.e., other websites linking to yours. “Link popularity” is the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site.

The rewards are large, and it’s a fundamental requirement for marketing any website. Here are some of the benefits of link building:

Increase search engine rankings
Link building puts you in search engines. Search engines rank web pages based on their importance. One big factor that makes a page “important” is the link popularity. A page with a higher “PageRank” is deemed more important than and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.

Improve PageRank
Every website is given its own PageRank. Using a special algorithm, your PageRank will be determined by the PageRank of others. If websites with higher scores link to you, your website will place higher in search results. The engines want links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site, such as well-known industry trade media and associations. If these other sites consider your site important enough to link to, in the engine’s view, your site is considered important as well. One or two authoritative sites linking back to you will do you more good than 100 irrelevant links.

Boost traffic
Link building is a great opportunity to build traffic. Many marketers think of link building as a component of SEO, which it definitely is. But it has an equally important benefit: building referral traffic. By getting links on reputable websites that reach your target audience you boost traffic, because visitors to that website also find yours. The traffic didn’t come directly from a search engine, but it is pre-qualified and equally valuable.

Why Business Directories?
If you are listed in a MediaBrains Business Directory, you have an opportunity to get high quality links to your website. Our Business Directories rank high with search engines because they are trusted, quality sources of industry information. MediaBrains has optimized the Business Directories for search. You build referral traffic by having your links on these industry websites. And you get business traffic only – rather than unqualified consumer traffic.

Find your market, add your company and start your link building campaign >>

Posted in Best Practices |

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.