Search Engine Optimization  •  Help & Assistance

Optimize your web site for high search engine rankings - linking to your web site

Enumclaw  •  Auburn  •  Kent  •  Renton  •  Federal Way areas of King County,  Washington (WA)

Linking to your web site

One of the things that influence a search engine most - especially Google - is finding links on other sites to your site. This is like manna from heaven to a search engine and the more links to your site it finds on its crawling expeditions the more it will be influenced to rank your web site higher for various search terms.

Finding places to link your site on is not that easy though. There are plenty of "link farms" out there offering to link your site if you will link theirs - known as reciprocal links. These site are simply places where there are thousand upon thousands of links to other web sites. This is why they are called link farms as that is all they do: farm links to thousands of site in the hope of influencing search engines to take those links onboard when they see them. This used to be true some time ago, but now those link farms are proving detrimental to web sites and search engines such as Google are ignoring these link farms, and sometimes even banning sites who use them. Be aware!

The best way to establish inbound links to your web site is to do it manually by asking other site owners if they will link to you. This is not always easy, but if your site bears some relation to the person you want to link with it may prove beneficial. For instance, you might want to link your Red Bicycles site to Bill's site that sell only spare parts for bikes. As you are not competitors, it appears that both sites complement each other thus making a prospective link a good idea. However, asking the owner of Bill's Bike Store to link with you would not be a good idea.

Spending a few hours searching around the web for directories and databases that you feel relevant to your business is another good idea. Most databases and directories offer free listings for small companies. While doing your free listing, you write the relevant text for your business and include the link to your site in there. Then you have another link to your site - but only after the search engines have crawled the directory's site again. You might have to wait a while.

It is not always possible to offer a reciprocal link to places that are going to link your site. In the commercial world, not many sites will be happy to show a bunch of links that have no bearing on their company. However, there are enough places out there that will link your site, if it is relevant, without needing a similar commitment from you.

Unfortunately linking is a time consuming task but worth it in the end.

Please do not hesitate to contact me further for more info on this fascinating subject.

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