July 9th, 2011 : What You Don't Know About Links Could Hurt Your Business

What You Don't Know About Links Could Hurt Your Business

For every online business, links are vitally important. Links can help or hurt your website; it's not just a matter of "more is better." In this article we'll look at the difference between good and bad links, and how knowing this difference can help your business.

Why Are Links So Important?

First of all, what are links? Let's define them. A link is one of those underlined texts that takes you to another web page when it's clicked. That can be another page on your own site, or it can lead to the website of someone else. As innocent as they look, there is a lot going on in the background that you don't see. Namely, major search engines like Google use them to determine importance.

The basic idea is simple. If many websites point their links to one particular place, then that place is very likely to be popular. These are known as "inbound" links. With many inbound links, your website will show up higher in the search results. While nobody knows Google's exact numbers, it's understood that more importance is placed on links than what you do on your website itself. When an SEO company arranges many links pointing to your website, this is known as "off-page SEO."

The Quality Of Links

Google also assigns importance based on the quality of outside websites linking to yours. For example, ten high quality links would beat thousands of lower quality. What makes a high quality link? Typically, they come from credible sources like government sites, universities, CNN, Digg, and more. The longer a website has been established and the more popular it is, the more their links pointing to your website give it a "halo effect" of sorts. Their credibility lends to yours.

Shady Link Practices To Avoid

As mentioned earlier, inbound links help you. Likewise, links pointing from your website to others can hurt you if you've got too many or the wrong kind. In most cases, however, you can simply end up wasting time and money with no results.

For example, you wouldn't want thousands of links pointing to obscure websites. Then you'd likely have more links going out than coming in. Likewise, your "outbound" links can hurt you if they point to shady websites such as hacking sites and the like.

Many SEO companies understand the importance of links. You should too. If your SEO service insists on placing links to their website from yours, then insist otherwise. You should never have to link to your SEO company. Also, beware of SEO companies touting schemes of link exchanges or promising to submit your site to thousands of search engines. In most cases, these schemes won't help you. They may actually be a ploy to help the SEO company. In the worst case scenario, they could get your website dropped from Google completely.

So, this is why links are so important. Links tell Google that your site is worth looking at. But bad links can damage your site's Google ranking and actually backfire. Make sure you understand what kind of linking your SEO company is doing.

Tags: Local Internet Marketing, Local Internet Advertising

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