Link Building for SEO - Is the Quality More Important Than the Quantity?
By Tony Hill
Link building remains a key component of the search engine optimisation process. The abundance of link building websites and emails regarding “link exchanges” are a testament to this. Generally speaking, the more backlinks a site has, the higher that site will rank for the keywords associated to these links. However, ranking high on Google is not as simple as that.
Leading search engines are now associating more importance to websites with quality links over sites with a higher quantity of links. It is therefore paramount that SEO agencies and organisations conducting SEO activities in house focus on building a strong series of quality links to websites as part of the link building campaign. But what does Google define as ”quality” and how can your website achieve backlinks from these websites?
The Page Rank of a website is usually a good indication of the quality Google associates to that site. Page Rank, often known as ”PR”, is a link analysis algorithm used by Google. It serves as an effective indicator of how important Google views a website and is based on the number and quality of in-bound links that site has attained, ranked on a scale from 0 to 10. Generating links from websites that have achieved a higher Page Rank will help establish more authority to your site, however, the sites ought to be related and the links must to be qualified.
Google visits and crawls the information contained within your site regularly and, from this, gathers a good idea of what your website promotes or sells. From assessing your website content, Google will define a category that your site falls into. For example, if you”re selling ready made pie ”n” mash meals in the north of England, Google will place your website in categories such as ”Food and drink”, ”Food manufacturing”, ”Ready meals” and so on.
When launching your link building campaign, it is therefore ideal to gain backlinks from sites that are related to the food and drink sector and food manufacturing. Links from websites that are not within the same Google ”neigbourhood” are likely to be deemed as lower quality links, as the relationship between the two sites will be deemed as unqualified.
Through establishing a strong number of qualified backlinks from websites that are themselves of a good quality and advanced PR value, your website will be able to outrank more established sites that have built up a vast quantity of links across the years. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to link building; integrating this view into your link building campaign will place your website in good stead to see great results from SEO.
About The Author
web design agency and SEO kent are currently being researched by Tony, an online marketer
