Search Engine Optimisation Made Simple
Back Links
One of the hundreds of methods that search engines use to determine your importance or relevance on the search engines is by looking at your back links.
What exactly is a back link? Put simply, a back link is a link from another site which links back to your own site.
At FirstFound we follow a practice of keeping it simple. Our focus is to source quality links from relevant sites with a good page rank. Link building is one way of improving search engine rankings. Search engines when deciding how high to rank a website, will look for relevance by recommendations and these recommendations come in the form of high quality back links. For this reason it is safer and better practice to go for quality rather than quantity.
Be warned! Low quality or irrelevant back links can do more harm than good. Search engines are intelligent. They know what a good source of back links is and what isn’t. If the search engines suddenly see a large amount of back links coming into your site within a short space of time, they will think you have sourced these links via some sort of automated process.
In today’s competitive market of search engine optimisation, many companies have adopted a technique commonly known as link spamming or link farming, this is where the company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to the site regardless of the content on the originating site. Do not be tempted to buy into an automated back link scheme. Bad quality links from spam websites can be harmful if the directories or websites these links are coming from have not been vetted. A sudden rush of poor quality back links can be harmful to your rankings and could lead to search engines blacklisting your website.
Link farming is different from link building which involves identifying highly relevant websites and respectable business directories that have been checked and verified to make sure they have a page rank. FirstFound is careful to vet back linking sites carefully, to ensure they have a page rank and are relevant to a client’s website, which in turn will help with their rankings.
If you are in doubt about any particular site, simply ask yourself, “is this site helpful to someone?” A useful business directory is fine, but if you try clicking a few links and find yourself going in circles, unable to find anything meaningful, you probably have a link farm!
The use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is increasing. You can create user accounts on major social media sites, and by ensuring your profile has your company url included you can use your profile to link back to your site. Other users would follow your profile links and end up on your site. Social media sites are amongst the highest climbers in website rankings and will continue to grow. Spending a couple of hours a week doing this can dramatically help in your back linking campaigns.