When a new website or blog is created, it’s very important to have people visit. One may have the best product or content, but if no one can find the website, then only a limited number of people will be able to benefit.
There are several ways that one can get people to a site. A company can advertise on different websites to get awareness out, but over time, it may be a little costly, especially if a company has a limited budget to work with.
Building links is one great way to improve a website’s ranking. This is a popular SEO strategy. Links can often be compared to the number of roads or highways that lead to a town. The more roads that lead back to a town, the more likely it will get visitors. Search engines work on the same premise, if it sees a bunch of quality links from different high ranking, quality sites, it will see that the site as an authority site and give it a good ranking in the search engines. Though this is a good method for improving page rank, one must realize that there are strategies that will also get a site penalized and should be avoided at all costs.
Link Spam
This search engine optimisation strategy is used when a company or individual goes to forums, blogs and random sites to submit content and a link back to their site. A good example of this is when an individual leaves a comment with a link back to their site. This is not the best strategy to use, especially if the site where the comment left wasn’t related in any way to the target site, has poor ranking or is a link farm.
Purchasing Links
When a company employs a tactic like this, it purchases links. The ranking and the number of outbound links of the linking site will determine the cost that should be paid. One has the option of purchasing links that have a desired link text. Using this strategy could be dangerous because some search engines, like Google, don’t support this tactic. Google actually looks for sites that sell links and will ban them. Any companies that had purchased links from the banned site will lose all the links that were purchased.
Connecting to Link Farms
A link farm is a site that has a bunch of outbound links. Google frowns on link farms. Avoid creating sections on a page that link out to a bunch of different sites. This is a strategy that is used to trade links with another site. Sites that link to low quality sites, like link farms will lose credibility very quickly and page rankings will suffer.
Building Links Too Fast
One strategy that will put a website on the radar is using strategies that build links too fast. It’s normal for many sites to link to a site, but if it is done too quickly, it will not seem natural to the search engines. Make sure that when using link strategies, to build it at a consistent pace. If a strategy has been set to build 100 links for one week; do not build a thousand links the next. This will not seem natural and will get a site penalized.
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO strategies should be a part of every company’s strategy. When a company has optimised its pages such that it comes out ranking number one for specific highly search keywords, it will almost guarantee that a lot of visitors will be taking a look at the site. For a company to rank on the first page in many search engines, it should employ link building strategies to quickly improve a site’s rankings. But, before a company sets out to build links, it should review the strategies above carefully. These should be avoided at all costs because many of them will not improve page ranking and a site’s rankings will usually suffer.