Mediarun Search Marketing News

Link-building is still vital to SEO

May 18th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Link-building still holds its place at the top of the search engine optimisation tree. Arguably link-building has lost its impact somewhat since Google's inception, but it still has a substantial effect on the results of individual search engine marketing campaigns. In fact link-building accounts for more than two-thirds of a search campaign's marketing potential, according to leading industry experts.

But one of the things that Google does not appreciate is bought links or spamming. The developers behind the world's most popular search engine have been battling spam since businesses got to grips with its algorithms and so cheating at SEO by link-farming and spamming is well and truly a thing of the past.

That said, there are a number of legitimate ways to build links that will not impact on a business's search engine marketing strategies. These include submitting keyword-optimised articles to a variety of news websites, participating in social media marketing, or implementing a Google News feed.

Firms can also syndicate content, which can dramatically boost the number of inbound links a website has, which in turn can boost SEO dramatically.

So setting up a legitimate link-building strategy can pay dividends, but it can also be very labour intensive, which is why hiring in a professional SEO Company to do the leg work is a must - especially for smaller, under-resourced businesses.

Another point to bear in mind is that broken links can actually hinder a company's search engine optimisation efforts. This means that maintaining links and chasing down any that are pointing to the wrong places is vital.

Industry expert Chris Thomas claimed that failure to rectify broken link issues by contacting the relevant webmaster can easily damage a firm's reputation, both among potential customers and search engine webcrawlers.

"I'm often amazed at the amount of external links coming into client sites which point to pages which are 'not found'," Mr Thomas wrote in a blog post for Smart Company.

He added: "Simply contact the webmaster and ask him or her to update the link.

"Putting it bluntly, if someone links to a page which no longer exists causing a 404 error response from the server there's zero search engine benefit."

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