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However it becomes more complicated.
Not all links are equal.
Blindly rushing off and trying to get as many links as possible is not going to help you much. In fact it’s one of
reasons why people are spending so much time and effort in their link exchange campaigns and finding they are getting nowhere.
Savvy online marketers have established that links from pages with a low pagerank are not as valuable as links from those with a higher pagerank. But also in paradox to this it is possible to get more value from linking to a page with lower pagerank than higher one!
Confused! No wonder “off page optimisation” is becoming such a sought after area of expertise.
The paradox occurs because built into pagerank algorithm is a method of transferring amount of pagerank “boost” a page gets by dividing up total pagerank of a page by number of links present. So a high pagerank page with 100 links on it is not going to give as much “voting power” as a low pagerank page with only one or two links on it.
Trying to make sense of this is at heart of any “off page optimisation” campaign. Sifting through links, setting up reciprocal link campaigns (the site you link to links back to you) getting links from directories and so on is a time consuming task, even when using some of more advanced tools that take a lot of manual drudgery out of job.
Link exchanges are springing up all over place offering to bring together people willing to exchange links and humble text link is becoming one of most valuable pieces of internet property. Costs for placing text links on higher ranked sites are escalating and it’s becoming ever more important to network closely with other sites offering useful services to your visitors.
Throwing up a links page and asking all and sundry to link to it is not going to work – all that’s going to do is give you an administrative headache and make your visitors wonder if they are making right choice. Choosing quality link partners is a time consuming and therefore expensive business.
What this all means is that cost of website promotion is constantly going up. And those companies with well networked sites and strategically placed links are in a much better position to help their customers than those who rely solely on pay per click campaigns and other expensive forms of advertising.
A website promotion campaign is still best value for money form of advertising that there is in my opinion, it’s just that costs are rising and will continue to rise. But rewards for those that get it right are greater in comparison.
To sum up, search engine optimisation is becoming a more and more labour intensive exercise. There are more pages to be made search engine friendly and to gain top spots each page has to be tuned for a particular search engine. Gone are days of “one size fits all”.
In addition there is a large amount of work involved in linking strategies and building “popularity” of a website so that it has a chance of making it into top 10 results.
It’s this combination of work required that is forcing up costs of a search engine optimisation campaign.
Tony Cooper is internet marketing manager for: http://www.keywordmarketing.com Building results driven websites.
