4.2 What's the purpose of links?

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First of all, any link to your site can bring you visitors.

If your friend T-Jay has a website www.t-jay.com and you have a site www.alison.com, T-Jay can put a link on his site that leads to your web page: visit Alison. Some people that come to him will see that visit Alison link leading to you, click it and come to your site, too.

So it's good to have lots of links — they're sending more people to your site.

Secondly, (though much more important for you), Search Engines also see links. And they not only follow links to crawl your site. They look at links as a proof of your site's importance. In terms of SEO, links work like votes. And this needs to be discussed in more detail.

4.3 Sites vote for each other

Actually, links are the main part of what optimization's about, and I'll tell you why.

In fact, each link is a vote. If 5 sites link to your site that means that you've got 5 votes. I guess you remember what I told you about Search Engines — they're trying to think like real people. So they basically think, the more links you have, the better.

Yes, Search Engines rely on many opinions, like real people. For instance, one of my friends is going to Rome but hasn't chosen a hotel yet. Maybe I could give him a piece of advice? I've never been to Italy, but my wife went there on business trips, and I've heard from her that she didn't like Hotel Milton Roma, but Astrid was very good — so that's what I'll tell my friend: Astrid must be good. But then he asks three more opinions, and other guys say that Hotel Astrid was disgusting, so he'll rather trust the majority and won't book Astrid either.

It's by the links that Google judges how important your site is. If many sites vote for your webpage, Search Engines think that it really has something important to offer and can be useful to Internet users. So Search Engines will show your webpage higher in their search results pages, thus making it easier for visitors to find.

Simple logic of this would look like this: I've got 1,200 links, and my competitor has 1,000. So I should be in a better position. Still it's not that easy as it seems.

Links can also have different value. Like anything else, links can have high or low quality, and due to that some of them are more trusted by Search Engines than others. And in fact, how good your links are is much more important than how many you have. We'll talk a real lot about quality of links — but I'll save the talk for just a bit later.

What you must understand well now is: it's thanks to links that you finally find your site at the top of Search Engines' results pages.

4.4 How do we get links?

Before I tell you this, let's recall that links serve two purposes.

• They send you visitors, or traffic, from other people's websites.
• They work for SEO: increase your position in Search Engines and let you get much more visitors through natural search.

Here's the obvious conclusion: it is more profitable to get links for the purpose of SEO.

I often say "buy, beg or steal" but in fact, when you're getting links, generally there's just one parallel here: free — and non-free. So you can get a non-paid link if your page's content is really valuable and important and someone decides to link to you. Or you get a free link in exchange for something: say, a reciprocal link. And you can get a paid link, which's probably much easier, but is not always that good.

Here's what Search Engines believe: if you're buying a link from site A, you wish to get visitors from that site also come to your own site (like Alison was getting visitors from T-Jay). Search Engines do not actually expect that you would buy a link in order to get an extra "vote" and raise your site's rankings. Therefore, if Search Engines assume that a link is paid, they don't give it too much value, and it won't be any good for your rankings. Also, occasionally Search Engines penalize some sites if they sell links for SEO purposes.

You can mark a paid link. Read how you do this. Search Engines themselves recommend using a rel="nofollow" attribute in paid links. This attribute tells Search Engines not to follow and not to index a link. So if you buy a link and don't want it to be involved in SEO, make sure it includes the rel="nofollow" attribute.

And let me repeat this once again:

Search Engines believe in getting links to send people from one website to another. They expect that we shouldn't be buying links for SEO. But the controversy is: if you'd buy links for the purpose of SEO, that would pay much better than if you'd buy links for visitors.

Here's a simple example:

Say, you're optimizing for the keyword ecards and have a paid link from www.birthdays.com When we estimate a site's traffic, we say that 100,000 of monthly traffic is really good. So let's think that your link partner www.birthdays.com has got really good traffic. If you've got a paid link from some site, and 5% (which is normal for a link) of these people click on your link, then you're getting 5,000 visitors.

Now — the word ecards is searched 19,280 times daily, which is about 578,400 monthly (according to Wordtracker keyword tool). Statistics shows that 42.3% of web searchers click on the first result in Search Engines. So if you've got a #1 placement for ecards, you'll be getting 244,663 visitors monthly.

So in this case your #1 placement brings you 49 times more visitors than a link from traffic-rich site — which can result in as bigger a profit.

This demonstrates that good Search Engine position results in much more traffic than a paid link. And this is why we do SEO. Sites that are getting traffic thanks to optimization pay off better than sites getting traffic through paid links.

Previous: Chapter 4: Getting on the move: where your link building starts

Next: Quality of links

 

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