Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the term that describes how web marketers design (or optimize) a web page in order to attract the Search Engine “spiders” to crawl the site itself.
But having a web site is not enough. So what makes a website popular?
One of pillar of the SEO is the online reputation, therefore the capacity of the web site to be found in the SERPs.
And the basic component of online reputation is link building, which has not changed much over the past ten years. Yes, the search engines’ algorithm have been improved, yield the strategies to be adopted, but the concept is always the same.
That’s why you may often read that a key component to get a better ranking is the number and the relevance of inbound links from other web pages.
When a search engine crawler goes through a website it is unable to assess the web site design, to rate your services neither to completely understand what you wrote. All search engines can see (but not evaluate as a human can do) is the text content and the linking structure.
I was thinking on some reciprocal links …
The search engines will not put much value on an inbound link if the link strategy is based only on reciprocal links. This is to stop people from building hub (or networks) of links to artificially increase the value of a site.
I’m not saying that accepting or creating a reciprocal link from such a site is penalizing, but only that your link strategy cannot be concentrated only on this.
Creating a community of sites that will disclose about the same topics, contacting individual site owners for links can be time consuming but will, in the long term, provide you with visitors who are interested in your site and in your services, and consequentially will bring your page rankings up.
So you need to know from where obtain links, how best to go about it and how to avoid polluting and damaging your site with the wrong links.
If you are tempted to get quick results, stop for a while before taking any action. Such a action generally runs wild the search engines wrath, and you even being banned from their listings, as opposed to benefit from a high ranking.
So what is the best link building strategy?
There are no guarantees, but a quality content represents effective and ethical SEO strategy to increase your link strategy, and it’s certainly a positive way of increasing the value of your web site.
So while doing content copywriting of your site, don’t think about how to optimize your site for the search engine but to your users, who need to find useful, fresh and relevant content that they may love to link.