Building links to your website is a critical step in getting it found by the right people.  You might think links are important because people can click on them and come to your site.  That is certainly true.  But they can also be extremely valuable, even if nobody follows them.  Because search engines use the number and quality of incoming links to determine your website’s importance in their ranking algorithm, link-building can be an important strategy in building your business revenue for the long term.   As your site moves up the search ranks for search terms that are valuable to your business, you’ll enhance your ability to attract your most-desired visitors to your website.

Why & How Links Matter

A search engine’s ranking algorithm – the mysterious calculations used by Google, Yahoo & Bing to list websites in ranked order — is a dynamic beast, extremely complex and changing all the time.  While some people attempt to manipulate or “trick” the search engines into boosting their website’s ranking, it has become increasingly difficult to do this because Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have gotten very skilled at detecting such manipulations and will nearly always catch up with you.  The result of such behavior can be a “demotion” in rankings or, if serious enough, can be cause for de-listing a website altogether.  A much better strategy is to respect what the search engines are trying to accomplish, and to feed them what they want to know.   Here are the three primary questions a search engine is trying to answer when it indexes and ranks your website:      (more…)