Why are links important?

Once you’ve nailed some of the basic SEO tips you can do for your business, it’s time to start working on one of the most important aspects of search optimisation: link building.

Search engines value the links between websites highly. In fact, incoming links are the most important determinant of your website’s ranking for any given search term in Google.

You can think of links much like a voting system. As websites link to yours, Google counts them as votes, indicating that those websites consider yours to have something of value or relevance.

The important thing to remember is that the quality of the vote is significant as well. The authority and relevancy of the websites that link back to yours will determine how much weight Google gives to that link.

For example, a link from theage.com.au will inevitably be better than a link from mymumsblog.wordpress.com.

In fact, one link from theage.com.au will be better than the combined weight of 10 different links from Mydadsblog, Mymumsblog, etc.

This is because theage.com.au is an established site with a very strong history, thousands of links from other authoritative sites and Google knows all of these and more.

If the page that is linking to you is relevant to the theme of your site, that is given weight as well. For example, if an article on theage.com.au talking about web hosting services links to your web hosting business, that link will be more valuable than an article on ‘cooking’ that mentions web hosting services.