The word “linking” has likely been tossed around a few times.
Linking Basics.
The entire basis of the Google engine is, that pages with more links pointing to it will invariably be more relevant to users looking for information. This strategy is based on the idea that if you supply good content, web masters and users will link to you for info. This indexing was a very different approach than most search engines at the time, which relied on the amount of keywords in the content to determine its relevance. As well as the number of linking pages, the quality and relevance of the linking pages matter. If you sold shoes online and had 20 other websites linking to you concerning shoes, you will be regarded as more relevant than a shoe site with 20 links from say, pages selling dog food. Shoes and dog food don’t sync up, therefore is deemed not as relevant.
Because of this, your website’s link structure is very important. Internal and external. Internal linking looks like this: “Search Engine Optimization techniques vary widely, but usually fall under one of two categories, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.” These blue underlined phrases are called Hyperlinks. These are not links to other sites, however, they are links to other pages on the VISAO Solutions website.
This is internal linking at its most basic and is a great way to be sure all of your pages are indexed by the search engine spiders. Internal linking’s primary focus however, is to bring more links to your page, thereby becoming more “relevant” to the search engines. Our page on SEO is trying to be relevant for the term Search Engine Optimization. By providing a link to that page from other pages, it is looked at as being “even more” about SEO than a page that does not have these links.
Relevant External Linking.
This internal linking strategy is then applied to the online community.. The more relevant in-bound or backlinks you receive from other websites, the more “relevant” the search engines will deem you. So what’s the catch? Creating your own link structure is easy, getting other sites to link to you is not.
There are hundreds if not thousands of companies that are solely dedicated to buying or selling links. Recently Google has been actively penalizing sites for engaging in these practices, citing that the act of buying links is a blatant attempt to mislead the search engines into assigning a false relevance. This penalization does not apply to all businesses, as buying and selling links is a normal part of an online economy, but when the links are used to pass on PageRank, Google draws the line. Passing on PageRank means that websites with a high PageRank like 7 or 8, will sell links to other sites with a low PageRank. Because the linking site has a high PageRank, Google will rank the lesser site as being more relevant. This is creating results that may not hold the relevancy and credibility that Google and other search engines are looking for.
There are many ways to obtain solid links. The most common, other than buying links, is link bartering. This is the practice of trading a link for a link, and is mostly utilized by sites and webmasters with similar PageRank. Linking out to other sites does not help your ranking as much as receiving links does, but it certainly doesn’t hurt you. Usually linking to another page results in link reciprocation, which is just a less formal term for link bartering. Give links to get links.
Dirty Links.
The only time that linking out can hurt your ranking is if you link out to a site that is part of a “bad” network. If the page has been flagged or banned, or even if the page is just linking to banned or flagged sites, this can hurt you in the eyes of the search engines. Do not let this dissuade you from linking to other sites. Linking is a very natural part of being on the internet. In fact, a website that has very few, if any, outbound links or references, can look very unnatural. Links are a great way to provide additional information to your users. If you provide good sources for more information, you will still be deemed the original source of information and be credited with the information that you linked to!
There are many SEO companies that still use what is considered “Black Hat” SEO. Black Hat is a term used in the computer world to reference not-so-accepted techniques. Creating invisible, or hidden links on your website in an effort to trade links with other sites is often viewed as Black Hat. There are quite a few techniques that have become black hat, most of which were very innovative and quite effective at some point. Today they are just a good way to get your site flagged or even banned. The best advice is to ask questions and discover a company’s ethics on the subject. Your SEO company should be able to answer any question you have with 100% certainty and transparency. If you find questions are being dodged, this may be a good indicator that black hat techniques are being employed.
The ultimate key to gaining linking is community building and information dissemination. Provide engaging content for your users and link into online communities. Using those simple guidelines, you can begin putting your budget into quality content and earn free links as opposed to buying them.