Why Have a Link Building Campaign?

Simply speaking the web is a huge collection of pages all linked together. No matter how good your site is, people cannot find it if it is not linked to other sites. Your site will acquire incoming links naturally as people who find it interesting or useful will reference it from their own sites or forum posts. This natural process takes time and you have no control over where the links are placed. A link building campaign speeds up the process and allows you to reach people who are looking for the type of product or service you provide.

Quality is more important than Quantity

You have probably seen people offering to sell you hundreds or thousands of links. These links tend to be of poor quality and so don't provide the benefits that you expect. At Top Gear Media we focus on getting relevant, high quality links. Before we even try to negotiate with a site owner we evaluate their site, not just generally but with respect to your subject area. We check the following factors amongst others:

• Site Visibility - We check how extensively the other site is indexed by the search engines. If the bulk of their site isn't visible to the search engines then neither will your link be. Also a site that has good visibility tends to have greater traffic. There is little point in having a link that few people will see.
• Incoming Links - If the site in question has good quality incoming links then not only will it rank well in the search results but also there will be a flow of quality traffic which should pass along to you.
• Other Outgoing Links - We take into consideration the types of links that will share the page with yours. If they are all related to your subject the page is well focused and thus the link would be a valuable addition to your campaign.
• Visitor Quality - Some sites will provide you with visitors who are ready to make a purchase. For example, a UK-specific shopping directory would be ideal for a link to a British ecommerce site.

Writing to Attract Visitors and Search Engines Alike

Usually links are accompanied by a description of your site. We write this text to suit the context, with the aim of encouraging people to click through to your site. It is vital to stand out from any other links on the page, so time invested in writing good copy is time well spent.

Search engines are especially interested in the link text (also known as anchor text). So this is written to include your chosen keywords without sounding contrived. It can also be useful to gain links to pages other than your homepage. It looks more natural to the search engines and it helps direct visitors to where they want to go. In this way you can advertise a subsection of your offerings and have users go straight to that section rather than having to find it for themselves from the homepage.