Search Engine Rankings For Small Businesses – Understanding Links

One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is linkbuilding. A link is a web address that points to a page on the website that the owner is attempting to optimise.

A lot of small business owners make the mistake of focusing almost exclusively on on-page factors such as, keyword density, meta tags, HTML titles and other on-site elements. While these are important within the context of SEO, links are far more important. Understandably, there is a built-in bias towards on-site elements.

After all, a website is visually tangible, while links are vague and may not have any dedicated tools to quantitatively analyse them. However, all SEO projects depend on links to work.

Why are links so important to SEO?

The more links a website has, the more authoritative it will appear to the search engines. This general principle has a caveat: The more links a website has from multiple domains, the higher its search engine ranking (Note: as long as they are good quality links from high quality relevant websites – not from content farms).

Ideally, a website would have one link from each domain that links to it, and a lot of domains sending it links. Two hundred total links with one link per domain means over 200 unique domains are linking to the site. This makes the search engines perceive the website as having more value. Links are critical to the successful performance of a website when it comes to doing small business SEO.

Formatting the links in the correct manner is also crucial. It is advisable to have appropriate anchor text for the link if possible (anchor text is the words that the link contain, these should be the same as the keywords that the page is optimised for rather than just the domain or brand name).

It is also important to build links to internal pages of the website (not just the homepage), this will assist the internal pages of the website with their rankings and will also help the website as a whole.