seoforsmallbiz.com

A friend of mine asked me about tracking inbound links, as he wanted to count number of links as a measure of effort by his marketing team.  Counting number of links may not be the best way to measure your marketing effort!!

Google and Yahoo pay a lot of importance to the sites that are linking to others pages.  The terminology often used to explain this is an island.  If you have a page (an island)  and I build a bridge to your island, it means that that island of yours is important and relevant to my users.  Now if my island is a big, important island, and I build a bridge to you, then the search engines say, well that new small island must be important as the big island build a bridge.

The message between the lines here are 2 fold, the first one is that the sites that are linking to you must be relevant to your content.  So getting500 links from unrelated sites do not mean anything.

The second point is that the sites that are linking to me should be reputable sites, meaning established sites, with good content, good history, and good traffic.  Creating 30 new one-page-sites and linking them to your page will not help.

My advice: Look at who is ranking high for the terms you want to target.  Visit the top 50 sites and see if they even link to other sites.  If you have some page content that you think will add value and be interesting to their uses, send them an email.  You might get a link.

But if you do not have content that would be interesting to their users, don’t bother asking for a link.  Work on creating content that will be desired by other sites!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.