Yes folks its time for another thrilling installment of search made simple. Today I am going to explain why links are so important. So here goes:

“Links are like votes for your website!”

Many clients know links are important but to really motivate them it helps to explain why…

A few years ago when there were fewer optimised sites it was possible to optimise a website on the page and achieve great rankings as a result. However as competition increased search engines (In particular Google) had to find other ways to rank their sites. They realised that quality sites would be linked to by users and in fact they could use this information to rank sites. This means in essence they get humans to do the work the spiders can not.

Simply put search engines see back links as a vote for a website, however this is no democracy as links from some websites carry much greater weight than others. For example a link from the home page of the BBC website would be worth thousands of links from smaller non reputable sites.

This highlights the need not just for links but for links from relevant quality sites.

This also explains why search engines place so much weight on links from social media sites these days. Tagging, bookmarking, sphinning, digging and stumblingupon are all ways in which users these days can let other users and the search engines know that they have found content that they like and is of use. Humans are still the best judges of a sites quality and search engines know this.

Hopefully understanding why link building is important can motivate clients to work harder at building relationships with complimentary businesses and consumers alike. It also explains why these days interesting, informative and entertaining content are so important.

Also lets not forget that good quality links can provide you with relevant traffic and in fact the traffic provided by links can actually be better value for money than PPC and SEO. Once a link is set up it can provide traffic for years with no extra costs.