Why is Link Building Important?  

Search Engine Optimisation (or "SEO" as it's referred to in the industry), involves making changes to your website to ensure it ranks highly in the search engine results on popular internet search engines like Google & Yahoo.   SEO requires two main areas of focus - firstly, changes to your website structure and technical construction (meta tags, page content, menu's and links on your site etc), and secondly, the links coming in to your website from 3rd party websites.

Links which point to your website, from other websites, are counted by Google and the other search engines as a vote of the importance of your website.  The process of generating these links into your website is called "Link Building".

What sort of links do you need? 

The following are important considerations for link buidling in obtaining links which point to your website from other websites:

• When Link Building, you should aim to have as many one way, inbound links pointing to your website from 3rd party websites, as possible
• If possible, these links should be from websites which themselves are important or highly ranking, or educational or government institutions
• Avoid "reciprocal linking" schemes where you exchange links with other websites, unless they are highly relevant to your websites target audience
• Ensure that links created from your Link Building efforts use link text or wording in the link itself contains two keyword terms which you want to rank for
• Try to get links from websites that are related to the subject of the page which they are linking to.
• Try to get links from pages which do not have hundreds of links pointing out to other websites i.e. pure "links" pages

Salsa offers services in link building.   We have 2 full time staff members performing link buildin who scour the web seeking out methods to build links pointing to your website which aim to meet as many of the criteria listed above as possible.

What do we do?

Salsa will perform the following types of link building on behalf of your organisation:

1. Directory Submission - we identify internet directories that permit a free listing to be added to the directory, and we will add your business to the relevant category in these free directories.   Where allowed according to the directory's submission guidelines, we will use "link text" which employs the main keywords which we are seeking to target in your SEO programme.
2. Social Bookmarking - this refers to websites such as StumbleUpon.com which themselves act as an index of websites of interest, and a way for internet users to share links to websites of interest.   Salsa's link building team will register your website with these sites creating multiple inbound links to your website, again - employing "link text" which makes use of important keywords being targeted.
3. Article Syndication - this refers to the process of putting informational (non promotional) articles up on your website which can be used in two ways.
   
   Firstly, these articles themselves act as a magnet for internet user traffic where users are searching for subject matter which your articles cover. Secondly, these articles can be "syndicated".   This involves posting a copy of these articles to websites such as ezinearticles.com and similar sites which distribute copies of your article to 3rd party websites who themselves are seeking sources of news or informational content in their area of expertise to populate their sites.   Most article directories or syndication sites like ezinearticles.com will permit an "author bio" section which can be used to create a link back to your website, which again, helps build up the number of links to your site and uses relevant link text. 

How much does it cost?

The price of Link Building can vary depending on your website, the industry you're targeting, and how quickly you would like to rank well.   Salsa can advise you regarding which link building package is appropriate depending on how fast you wish to achieve strong rankings for the keywords you are targeting, and depending on how much competition there is online for these keywords.  If you are targeting some of the highly competitive industry segments online, and even higher level of link building investment or content creation programme may be required.   Salsa can provide advice in relation to what is required to achieve strong rankings in your industry based on the nature of your website structure, and the keywords for which you wish to rank highly.

Some important issues to be aware of

While Salsa has considerable experience in helping websites achieve strong rankings on the search engines, we can not, and do not guarantee specific rankings  or positions in the search engine results as an outcome of our SEO programme.  It should also be noted that achieving strong rankings is conditional upon having both the structural elements of your website in good shape, AND having a good number of relevant links coming in to your website. One without the other will not assure a strong ranking on the popular search engines.