Link Development
Link development is one of the most challenging parts of search engine optimisation. Google pioneered the concept of determining the importance of a website from the number of external web pages that link to it. Nowadays many other search engines pay a degree of importance to the number of inbound links to your web pages. What makes link development difficult is the fact that you have little, if any control over it.
Good links and bad links
Not all inbound links are equally important. Links from websites that themselves have many inbound links, i.e. more 'important' websites, are considered more valuable than links from sites with few inbound links of their own. However, all inbound links are good. Care should be taken when joining link farms and other such schemes which require you to link back to them. You are never penalized by search engines for any inbound links, but can be penalized by search engines, and even considered to be a spam site if you have too many irrelevant outbound links from your websites to other sites that are known by the search engines to be spammy.
Links from online directories
The Yahoo! directory and dmoz (Open Directory Project) are the web's leading directories for information. Getting your site listed on both of them is important as they both serve as very reliable points for other search engine spiders to find your site and crawl through it. Links from Yahoo! and dmoz are also important from a link building perspective as they both provide links to your site from a very highly ranked website.
In addition to Yahoo! and dmoz, you should also get your site listed on many other online directories as well as directories that provide information specific to your business and industry.
Links from related websites
Industry associations, partner companies, other companies in the same field that are not direct competitors, and websites providing information relating to your business and industry are all viable options to approach for links to your website. In these cases you could also provide links back to their website from yours as a courtesy, without worrying about being penalized by search engines, since these links would, in all probability be relevant.
Contact us to discuss how we can help you with search engine optimisation
