Friday, December 4, 2009

What is your link number?

Link building  - building up the number of links coming to your web site from other sites - is a lifeline for any online business or any entity with a web presence.  Links are one of the key factors in SEO (search engine optimization) and by extension, page rank, as indicated by Google.  Building these links can be as important an activity as preparing the content for your site.  Great to have good content, but if no one sees or finds it, what is the purpose?

I read an excellent article on web marketing by John Eberhard at http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/.  He lays out in very basic terms how to determine the number of links to a site, what the numbers should be, and how to achieve those results.

The process for calculating the number is simple: Bring up Google in a browser and type in your URL like this:
“yourwebsiteaddress.com” –site:yourwebsiteaddress.com in the search box and click the Google Search button.  Make sure you include the quotes, a space, a dash, the word 'site' a colon and the site address again. 
For example, this blog's entry as below:

"thesmallbizpro.blogspot.com" -site:thesmallbizpro.blogspot.com  

What results is a listing of the sites currently linked to the your (or any) web site or blog.  The number can be depressingly small or wonderfully large.  Eberhard suggests a minimum of 1000 links - less means link building needs major attention.  The optimum number in Eberhard's opinion is 3000-5000 or more.  What you can also derive from this data is the quality of the links coming to your site.  Low-ranked or seldom seen sites at the top of your list are an issue and will not help your cause to gain more site or blog traffic.

In the next article, I'll reveal some tricks for building those links.


- AJ

6 comments:

  1. Great info AJ, if one is building traffic they have to pay attention to the results.

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  2. Thanks for the feedback, Murdock. We try to help!

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  3. You are very welcome!

    We do the background work so you can run your business.

    :)

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  4. I think you have a few factors out of order...

    First the sentence:

    "Links are one of the key factors in SEO (search engine optimization) and by extension, page rank, as indicated by Google"

    ...is backwards. I would say that links are a key factor of page rank, and by extension SEO. Page rank is a part of the algorhythm of optimization, not the whole pie...

    Also, the notion of 3,000 - 5,000 inbound links is ridiculous. It's about quality, not quantity, in addition, it is more important that the search engines see an increase in the number of quality links over time, not a one time effort. Perhaps overtime, a lot of time, a site might earn many links, but we have plenty of client web sites, in competitive markets, with competitive search terms that have lower page rank, and far fewer inbound links.

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  5. Great article - makes me realise I have a long way to go!

    Thanks

    Matthew

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