In the simplest of terms, a Search Engine sees a link to your web site as being like a vote of confidence in your web site...

Search Engines believe that if other websites are linking to your web pages, you must have something good to link to and they will rate the page being linked to positively.

Search Engine robots or spiders continuously travel virally from web site to web site following links like an enormous daisy chain; in fact Search Engines initially discover your web site via a link from another web site.

Once your web site has been found, each page of your site is then ranked by Search Engines based on a complex set of criteria known as an algorithm; a piece of computer code that takes into consideration on-site and off-site factors collected by the robots or spiders. Data is then assembled, collated and evaluated in order to come up with a Page Score or Rank. This is how a search engine determines which sites to present when someone types in “best digital camera” or “Sydney hotel with harbour view”.

All things being equal, when two web sites have similar structure and content, the site with the best links will be served up first. Note that we wrote “best links” not “most links”. Some time ago, a site with the “most links” would have won out, however, although Search Engines may be blind to images, they are not blind to webmasters manipulating their algorithms. They are continuously fine tuning their spiders to exclude web sites that attempt to “fudge” a Search Engine’s results.

Remember that a Search Engine’s prime function is to deliver highly relevant results, not some mysterious pharmaceutical products when you are searching for those “hand made chocolates from Brazil”.

Search Engines today take into consideration several additional factors when rating Inbound Links to your site:

• the reputation or “Trust” value of sites linking to your web site
• the Theme or Relevance of sites linking to you
• the “Anchor Text” (the words that the link is embedded within) in links to your site

Here at 21st Century SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we have developed a proprietary database of over 2000 web sites, across a range of subjects and industries, that are happy to link to trusted, on-theme and relevant web sites of our client using recommended anchor text. A subset of this database forms the core of an Inbound Link Building campaign.

We then add to this core through researching your market and identifying web sites from your suppliers, industry associations, local businesses and trusted reference sites that are likely to be open to linking to your web site. We prefer to develop one-way Inbound Links but exchanging links with related sites is also a part of the plan.

We then hand submit to these sources via email or by a quick phone call, providing link details, site description and preferred anchor text.

Adding links requires persistence and patience and you just can’t hurry along the Search Engines’ recognition of these links. Also, adding too many links too quickly can result at best in a Search Engine ignoring the links and at worst penalising your web site and dropping it from their index. There is no “quick fix” and anyone who promises to achieve “a page one listing for high volume keywords in a month for $49.95 through adding 1000 links” to your web site is a liar and you are taking on a substantial risk.

Yes, short term results can be achieved through certain “black hat” Inbound Link building techniques and we have seen them all…but the risk of having your web site banned from Google, Yahoo or MSN, is just too great. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The Search Engines employ some of the smartest software engineers on the planet and they are light years ahead of anything you could think up to fool them.

We usually suggest that an Inbound Link building campaign be undertaken across a three to six month period, adding between 100 and 300 links per month depending on the scale of the web site.