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On-site optimisation is only half the equation. Equally important in determining the position of your website in the natural listings is the number, relevance, and rank of links to your site from other websites.
Why link popularity is important
This can be illustrated by entering the search term ‘miserable failure’ into Google. At the top of the listings, you’ll find the official website of The White House. Here is an example of how the position of a site can be influenced significantly by a number of other websites linking to it with a specific keyword phrase.
So, another part of your strategy for effective SEO should be building up a series of incoming links in order to increase your ‘link popularity’. Many companies try to achieve this by arranging reciprocal links with other websites. If you do this, there are three important things to remember:
- the other websites should be directly related to the keywords for your services
- they need to be highly ranked by Google to make a positive effect on your ranking
- take care not to participate in a link farm, as these are often blacklisted by Google.
Reciprocal links
Our experience is that relying on reciprocal links to build site rank is time consuming, not always effective, and can have a negative effect. This is because you cannot normally control where in their site the other company puts your link, or what other companies are listed on their links page. You may find that you put a link to their site on a highly ranked page but that the other company puts your link on a hard to find, poorly ranked page.
It could damage the way your site is viewed by Google if your site is listed on a page with sites that are irrelevant to your services, or at worst, are unethical. This process is referred to as ‘co-citation’ because Google effectively regards the other sites as linked in the same basket as yours.
Fen Digital therefore has a policy of not taking part in link exchanges, and we have benefited from this by retaining greater control over our optimisation strategy.
An alternative way to build link popularity
It’s called a Fen Digital optimised profile, and it has the optimisation power to boost your link popularity significantly. Click the Profiles button on this site link to find out more about profile pages.
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