Link Quality Beats Quantity Every Time

Everyone knows links are important in driving traffic to your Web site and improving your search engine rankings. But before you start submitting your links to link farms and asking everyone you know to link to your site, think about the quality of the links you’ll be receiving. When it comes to search engine rankings and targeted traffic, quality outweighs quantity every time. Because the search engines are constantly being changed to reflect the changing needs of users, many search engine companies are concerned with improving the search experience. Part of improving this experience means changing the way links are counted and used to determine search engine rankings. Having many one-way links to your site is no longer the best way to generate more traffic and improve your search engine placement. Instead, you also need to consider the quality of your links, and that means changing your link building strategy. Consider the following the next time you are building links to your Web site:

Adding your site to a link farm can get you penalized. Adding your site to a link farm may seem like a good idea, but this is a case of “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Because link farms accept pretty much any site with the money to pay for a submission, you’re taking the chance of having your link placed near a link to an inappropriate site that you don’t want to be associated with. In addition, the search engines may penalize you for having a link placed on a site that is not relevant to your content. Instead of using link farms, find sites that are relevant to yours and arrange to have your linked placed on those sites.

The PageRank of a site isn’t the only factor to consider. Since PageRank has become a well-known method of checking how popular a site is, many people think that having a link placed on a site with a high PageRank is the best way to generate traffic and improve search engine placement. This is another case of quality taking precedence over quantity or popularity.