Yes and no... certainly not to the degree that others (even google themselves) will lead you to believe. Providing all other procedures are put in place, your website can have zero ranking links going to it, and still be listed above a similar site with 200 ranking links.
Many siteowners, web Designers, and even SEO Professionals will crave links. Links can increase the popularity of your website, both by opening new windows into it from other sites, and also by the Google PageRank system (currently becoming less important by the week). The basic theory is that the more links you have to your site, the better it must be, and therefore search engines will place it above other sites as it obviously must be more important and interesting.
The idea is fine in theory, but search engines want to display relevant information in order to keep their clients (ie you and me) coming back to use it again and again.. after all, it delivers the information you want. Nobody would carry on using a search engine that returned non relevant websites. This brings us to the real issue.. relevance.
If you have a web page that is relevant to a term, with coding that is correct and presents the term in the best possible way, then you have a huge advantage over a similar site with 200 more links, yet isnt quite presenting itself properly.
Lets assume your website or page has clearly identified itself as being about 'red widgets' (for example) right from the offset. The coding the search engines look for all contain words that reflect the page content. The page content itself is clearly about the subject matter, without dilution or non relevant copy text. The internal linking all state that this page is about red widgets, even the human visitor can instantly see what this page is about.
Now, when google does a quick check for sites with 'red widgets' in the code and content, it sees two sites. One has hundreds of links going to it, but isnt quite specific.. is it about red widgets? or how to cook a widget? or even green widgets? its hard to tell. The other is clearly identified as being about red widgets, and nothing else. But wait, it only has one link. It doesnt matter. This visitor wants to see a page about red widgets, and here is a page solely about red widgets. Which one is the search engine going to display?
Inbound links are important, but are only a small percentage of the algorthyms used by search engines to determine if a page is relevant or not. Other procedures are winning the race, and we can ensure your site is using them.
For more information please call us on 01283 548989 or use the contact form.
Last changed: Sep 13 2008 at 11:44 AM
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