I had a telephone call from a long time friend whom I have been helping with his website.  One of the questions we spent quite a bit of time over is the one of back links, or more properly links.  There really isn’t any difference between links and back links it’s just that some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ‘experts’ call back links the ones that are to your website from someone elses website and links are the ones from your website out.

Of course that means that the ones from your site would be back links for the recipient and the ones incoming for you are links to the provider.  Since the name is really just a matter of perspective shall we just call them links?

One of the serious parts of the discussion was to do with the value of links.  There are several reasons to have incoming links.  One reason is that a link from an active site will get your site found by the search engine robots (hereafter called bots) very quickly, that’s a good thing.  Another reason is that, with a well placed link you’ll get direct visitors, another good thing.

The search engines rank sites based on the number, relevance and value (which they determine) of each link to your site and the number, relevance and value of the links out, partly based on which sites they point to.

Only the search engine engineers really know how they rate the links and sites they find but it is useful to remember why the search engines exist in the first place.

Their business model is predicated on delivering relevant content rich websites to the people who search.  They don’t care if you have worked for 10,000 hours creating the absolute best site for left-handed blue widgets on the internet or slapped up a bucket load of essays you have written for school on the subject of keeping a garden tidy.  If there are no links pointing to your site then there are no other sites which think your stuff is valuable and the search engines will rate you accordingly.

You don’t need to have 100,000 links for the bots to rank you as valuable or even more links than your closest competitor, you do have to have more relevant links from relevant websites to be ranked as more relevant.

There are several excellent tools to help you with checking where you stand in the rankings and a swag of programs which claim to help you create links, most of which are expensive and not particularly useful.  Often they only work with one type of linking which isn’t totally useful as that leaves an unnatural footprint for link building, yes the bots can tell.

An that’s where my program comes in, no it’s not complete yet but it will have a range of different sites to add links to, you can edit them, delete them and add your own sites depending on your project.

As I said, coming soon.