Inbound links are essential in successful search engine optimization, say this SEO Agency
If you are like most webmasters, this article will only be the 100th article that you have read on SEO and advice from SEO agencies this year. Let’s face it; we are all concerned about getting better rankings in the search engines ‚Äì most of us are only really concerned with better rankings in Google, to be honest, since Google has a firm hold on 80% of all search engine traffic at this time. While Bing seems promising, to date it has only taken market share from Yahoo, instead of from Google.
The Golden Rule of Google SEO is to get links to your website from third-party websites. From the perspective of Google, it makes a lot of sense, since most people are careful whom they link to and will only link to websites that they truly like.
While the process seems really simple to the online marketing newcomer, in practice it is never as easy as one might think.
If you take the time to read Google’s Webmaster Guide, then you are well aware that one of Google’s recommendations is to make your site one that other webmasters will want to link. Now, if your website is an information portal providing the kind of information that hundreds of thousands of people would find useful, that is a simple and effective strategy. However, if your website simply sells products and services, third-parties are going to be less inclined to link to your website, because you simply offer products and services that hundreds of other websites offer.
Once most people realize that getting those all-important links is a difficult and time-consuming process, many give up on search engine optimization and abandon all hope of ever getting a good ranking in Google. Others enter into a world where the link is more important than everything else, and good links are ignored, because people have some unrealistic understanding about what defines a good link.
For example, people have it stuck in their heads that they always need to have links with alt or title text. But that is not always the best indicator of what constitutes a good link.
Other people have it in their heads that those nofollow links are a waste of time and money. Once again, those nofollow links can provide real value to those who know that a link is often more valuable than it appears on paper.
For a number of SEO agencies, those nofollow links are a gold mine, in that while the individual link may not offer any Google PageRank value, the link will inspire traffic that will lead to a webmaster creating a real link ‚Äì with a “follow ” tag ‚Äì to the page that they had visited through that nofollow link.
The shortsighted approach that many SEO agencies have when they are putting an estimated value on a potential link is a blessing to many SEO agencies. While one person may consider the link to be worthless, another may see that the rejected link will be worth its weight in gold to their website or their client’s website.
If you are able to put a link to your website on any page that points to other “high-value ” websites, you can bet that those other websites are there for a good reason. So if the high-ranking website has purchased a link on a particular page ‚Äì even with a “nofollow ” tag ‚Äì then you can bet that there are other advantages to that link, such as Bing or Yahoo rankings, or better yet, lots of traffic in the form of real people visiting real websites.
It would be foolish to suggest that getting great Google rankings would not be a blessing. But at the end of the day, that link that you had so far thought was worthless may in fact be the best investment that you have ever made in the promotion of your business. In fact, if you can put your links in the same sites where the big shots play, you can bet that the traffic from that site is strong, and more to the point, it will bring traffic that is inclined to link to your website from their websites – thus winning the Google search ranking game.