The importance of link building - pt 2

• Sep. 20, 2002

So, Why isn’t it that simple to collect good links?

 

Because although you may be able to get a bunch of sites to link to you on the term “widgets” you don’t know how qualified they are to give you that reference.  You see, while you are building your link popularity (the term used to describe link building) the search engines are also checking out your referrer’s link popularity.  If they are a site with little or no links pointing to them as an authority on what they do, then their link is worth less to you.

 

Now it’s starting to get difficult…

 

Not only do you have to find links to point to your site, you have to find reputable sites and convince them to link to you.  Further, if the site is in an unrelated industry, it’s link back to you isn’t going to be as “effective” as one that comes from another site with high link popularity AND in a similar industry as you.

 

Here’s an example.  Say you sell boats accessories online, and you are related to a webmaster at Microsoft.  Even though Microsoft is more well known than “Joe’s boat shop”, the link from Joe’s will be worth more in the end if he has good link popularity on his own, than the one from Microsoft, because Joe’s is in a related industry.

 

And you thought search engines were dumb.  (Okay maybe you didn’t).  My point is that as you can see it takes a lot of work to get good, qualified links back to your site.  It can take hours to find one or two really good links back to your site, or to convince other site owners to do the same.

 

So, how do you find these links?  There are some tools out there that can help you.

 

I would suggest first getting and installing the google toolbar (get it here).  This is as good a place as any to start.  The toolbar already “qualifies” sites for you by giving you the “PageRank” of a site.  Essentially what the Google PageRank does is qualify sites by the number of good quality links the site has, and assigns a number based on this qualification.  The higher the PageRank number the more qualified Google feels the site is for a particular search term.  Here’s the catch.  You can not rely solely on the Google “PageRank”.  As you will see, there are sites that may have a higher listing than your site, but with a lower PageRank.  I only suggest this as a starting point.  There are many other factors influencing rank such as quality of the site, relevance to the search term, sites that use flash and so on.

 

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