Linking the benefits

Linking your site to other, preferably complimentary sites, and creating back-links from as many of those sites to your own is only a part of the continuous Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) process. The linking has to be tied in to the key words and phrases you are currently targetting, carefully researching and choosing those key words and ensuring they are embedded behind your site and in the public text view. Even the embedding of the keywords and tags is Google sensitive, too many and you will be overlooked and repeating keywords on all your pages will create the same outcome.

The back-linking process can be labourious but if done properly can reap large rewards. For example we invested 4 hours of our time (unlucky Stephen) on Tuesday this week linking our own site to other complimentary sites; and the benefits were, as usual, astounding. Our site's traffic rose over a three day period by an amazing 862%.

Importantly - due to the control of who we link to - our bounce rate stayed the same. Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. This is used to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors. Hence the importance of having relevant links.

This sort of targeted traffic greatly improves return of investment (ROI). Due to the labourious nature of the work backlinking is often out-sourced and it is tempting to be seduced by various unbeleivable offers that are out there. A word of warning though - as stated above watch the quality of the links and keep an eye on that bounce rate. A bit of time and effort is sometimes the best investment you can make. Thanks Stephen!