How Search Engines and Link Building Work Together
Monday, September 28, 2009 Posted by !ndra
Why does my company/website need SEO?
It doesn't matter how great your content, or how beautiful your web design is, if you don't have enough traffic to your site, then it's useless. With 20 billion sites online today, there's a big chance that your site won't be discovered unless you hire SEO services which can help you get the word out about your products or service.
The majority of traffic to any website is driven by the search engines - Google, MSN (now Bing), Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. People go to these sites in order to search for the information that they need. If your website is not in the database of these search engines, then you are missing out a great opportunity.
Keep in mind, however, that the goal of SEO is not just to get your site indexed, but also, to get you on the top of the search engine results page (SERPs). According to many studies, when your site is listed in the top 10 of the SERPs, then its highly likely that people will visit your site. What does this mean for you? Well, it's pretty simple: the more people who visit your site, the greater your chances of making a sale. The more people who know about you, the greater your chances of creating a loyal customer base - repeat customers who will definitely refer you to their family and friends.
How do search engines work?
Perhaps you're asking yourself, "What does link building have to do with SEO?" Before we can answer that question, we will first need to understand how the search engines (SE) work. SEs are responsible for three operations:
Crawling the web using their spiders. These bots use the hyperlink structure of the web to crawl from one page to another.
Indexing of documents. Once a page has been crawled, the bots save these pages in a giant database of documents. They are sorted according to the keywords found in the pages.
Processing queries. When an Internet user goes to the SE and types in his/her keywords, it is the SE's task to retrieve the information that is related to the keywords used.
Ranking results. A list of websites will be returned to the Internet user. The list is arranged according to the order of importance, as ranked by the search engine.
From these 4 processes alone, we can already see how link building services is important. First, in order for your site to be crawled, you need to get more backlinks - those links from one website pointing to your site. According to estimates, only 8 - 10 billion out of the 20 billion WebPages today have been crawled and indexed. There are several sites that cannot be visited because there is no way for the search engines to discover them.
Second, website ranking in the SERPs is determined through a special algorithm known only to the search engines. While no one knows what are the exact factors that can get you placed high on the list, we know that search engines give importance to the relevance and popularity of a website. Popularity in this case refers to the number of backlinks to your site. The more backlinks you have, the more popular your site is. But millions of backlinks do not guarantee a front page listing in the SERPs. You also have to consider the relevance of your backlinks.
If your site is about computer tutorials, then you need to get backlink from sites which are related to your niche. For example, a link from a Photoshop tutorials site can help you gain greater authority but a backlink from a furniture dealer will not count.
If you have been working with a link building services for quite some time now and you haven't reached the first page of the SERPs, then you had better start evaluating the kind of links you are getting. Check for the relevance, as well as the quality of the links. High PR, .gov and .edu sites are considered as sites of high authority. If you are not getting backlinks from them, then you had better switch your SEO services today.
