Need better search engine rankings?

Better Links = Higher Search Engine Rankings

By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2003 Promotions Unlimited  All rights reserved.

This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorized use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.  

Link popularity and link quality are taken into consideration on almost every major search engine.  Next to informative, useful content, the number and quality of incoming links from other sites is paramount is achieving top search engine rankings.

Link popularity is really just the number of inbound links to your site.  Link quality is a measurement of the site that is linking to you. So, if you have links from low ranking sites and/or sites not related to your site’s theme, these links will not count as much as a link from a high ranked, similarly teamed website.

Example, if your law firm has a link from another law firm that has a few page one rankings for it’s specialty or locality (ex. San Diego lawyers), this one link to your site might have much more weight with some search engine algorithms as 30 links from an office supply company that has a no relative links higher than page five of search engine returned results. Actually, on some Webmaster Internet forums, the speculation seem to favor the idea that incoming links from low ranked off themed sites will actually be considered as detrimental to your site’s rankings.

What is not speculation is the fact that links from ‘link farms’ or other ‘instant’ link teams will not only penalize your site’s rankings but may even get it removed from certain major search engines!

Like most things in life, to get the benefit, you must prepare the groundwork properly. There is no real shortcut to quality link building. Link building is difficult, frustrating, and time intensive.

A manual email request to another Webmaster has been the standard in the past. Recently, specific software has become available that automates the locating of similar teamed sites, individually emailing them a link request and creating a link directory on your site. One of the best features of such software is the ability to quickly verify that your link is still on your partner’s site. Such link verification should be done at least once a month to insure that the linking webmasters are holding up their side of your reciprocal link agreement.

Want to check your site’s inbound links? An easy way to do this for Google is to type in   link:www your website address.com

Below is a report of inbound links for our San Diego directory. Here is a search run on 5-3-03:

Law firms can benefit from our Legal Excellent Award program. The program will provide your site with a link back from a top ranking legal directory. Plus, as the program is based on a nice legal graphic placed on your site, you not only get a great quality link, but a unique quality legal graphic that visually adds creditability to your site!  The entire program is free! If it sounds too good to be true, I should mention one little catch. To keep the link quality the highest possible, the main qualifying criteria is that your site must have at least one page one, search engine keyword ranking. This stringent requirement makes a link from this program worth 50 times or more a normal legal related link.

Link popularity - reciprocal links -- the easy way

After much investigation, I can suggest that anyone interested in achieving higher search engine rankings should develop a solid reciprocal linking strategy. The easiest way to do this is with the

The time invested in link building will pay off in better search engine rankings and is a good investment into your practice.