Getting links to your website

As a website owner you should always be working towards making your website pages show up high on the results pages. Most people will click on results that show up on the first page and over 40 percent will click on the top result. With everyone vying for the top spot, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are hot topics these days.

Market leader Google has developed a very sophisticated algorithm for ranking pages. This diagram illustrates the factors that are taken into consideration.

As you can see, links to your site and the overall reputation contributes to over 50 percents to your SEO success. Every time someone links to your site, Google considers this a vote for your site. The more votes (links) you have, the higher your rankings. The text that is used to link to your site (anchor text) is also an important factor in SEO. In web technology terms these are called ‘Off Page elements of SEO’ because they take place on web pages outside your own website.

Getting other sites to link to your site with quality anchor text can be a real challenge. However, there are many simple steps you can take to improve the number of links that point to your site such as registering your website at a number of relevant online directories. This ‘link building’ is an ongoing process and should be monitored for success. We are using online tools to manage SEO efforts for our clients. How important SEO is for your business determines how much time and effort you want to put into this. Feel free to connect with me to discuss this exciting, but sometimes overwhelming area of Internet marketing.