In addition to your Web site's content being optimized for Google to index it properly, there is another aspect of your Web site that dramatically affects your rankings, and it does not have anything to do with your content pages.
It is called link building.
Link building is important because your search engine rankings are impacted to a significant degree by Google's opinion of your site popularity.
Link building is the most efficient and effective way to boost site popularity and should absolutely be part of your search engine optimization strategy.
Think of the competition for the top rankings in Google as an accelerated version of the high-school popularity contest.
Google could look at two identical content pages from competing companies in the same industry, and the Web site that is determined by Google to have the highest level of site popularity is the one that will enjoy the highest search engine rankings.
Google essentially analyzes two main categories of information in determining their search engine rankings: 1.
The quality of your content pages and the pages' relevancy to the keywords that were just searched on by a Google user.
2.
The number of external or inbound links pointing back to your Web site.
Google not only evaluates the number of inbound links pointing back to your Web site, but Google also evaluates the site popularity of the site that posted the link back to you.
If the site popularity of the site linking back to you is high, then your site popularity goes up.
If the site has a low site popularity score, there is little to zero increase in your site popularity score.
In addition, Google wants to see some similarities between the content on your Web site and the content on the sites that have posted links back to you.
In short, Google has established two main criteria that you should keep in mind when working on your link building efforts: 1.
Your inbound links must come from Web sites that have an equal or greater site popularity score in Google than your Web site.
2.
The Web site that posted your link must be in a similar industry, or relevant in some other way to your Web site, so there is a parallel in content between the two sites.
If your inbound links do not meet both of these criteria, Google will score the links as having little value to your Web site.
This discourages people from creating links that are of no real value to site visitors, solely for the purpose of increasing site traffic.
These irrelevant links are typically created through the use of a "link farm".
Offers to boost your number of inbound links for a small fee often come from link farms.
It is common for the offers to explicitly state the number of inbound links the service provider will guarantee as a result of the project.
I have never read a link farm offer that guaranteed to provide links from Web sites that would actually be relevant to the business owner paying for the service.
Using a link farm is not worth the financial investment because Google does not value the links generated by link farms.
Google has even been known to penalize Web sites that employ link farms to generate a high number of irrelevant inbound links.
Because of this, I would never recommend that you use a link farm to generate inbound links as part of your strategy to increase your Web site's popularity score.
Investing time toward link building provides you with the most efficient, effective, and legitimate way to increase the number of in-bound links point back to your site, and your site popularity.
Instead, focus on high-quality link building to increase site popularity.
Link building can dramatically increase the number of inbound links to your Web site coming from credible sites.
Google will reward you for these types of inbound links.
And consequently, the popularity of your Web site will soar, and so will your search engine rankings.
Plus, link building is 100 percent free.