I get many enquiries from clients about whether they should have links or not on their website. The answer is a very big YES — but only if they would provide a good resource for visitors to the site.
Links are also very important to the success of your sites on search engines — but not so much the links on your site — it’s the links into your site that matter most. The search engines track which sites are linked to you taking into account the relevancy to the topic of your site and how well ranked that site is.
So if you are a hairdresser in Clonakilty a bunch of links from sites for holiday homes in Asia are not going to help your site’s rankings. You need to have links from sites related to hair dressing, and perhaps other beauty topics and other local business sites. It’s not so easy, as the most relevant sites are probably your competitors and you probably don’t want to promote them.
One other thing to keep in mind if you are working on getting links into your own site – the ‘link text’ should be made up of key phrases (i.e. phrases that people will search on to find your site). So when you ask for a link to your site, indicate how you would like it to appear on the other site. “Holiday Cottages Ireland – Inish Beg” is better than “Inish Beg” or “www.inishbeg.com“.
We have hard proof that links are important for good results on search engines. For sites we have done where all other things are pretty equal (coding, content, etc.) the sites with a number of incoming links do better than others. The more competitive your industry is on the internet, the more links you will need. There is no magic number and quality is definitely better than quantity.
It’s hard work requesting web site owners and web master to link into your site — especially as most of us are bombarded with spammy link requests — but definitely worth the effort. Or, you can hire us to do all that hard work for you. We have managed Link Building Programmes for a number of our clients. Read more: Link Building
