Search Engine Consultancy
Position Lab offer a choice of detailed consultancy or in-house training to help get you started, to the point where you can comfortably continue for yourselves.
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Link Gathering
This is one of the most important aspects of getting your website to rank well. So much so that Google, who are rarely moved to tell anyone anything about how to make a website rank well, offer the following comment:
"In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."
Thanks, Google! No mention of what constitutes a ‘high quality’ site though, you’ll notice. No matter. Like Robert Pirsig in his seminal work ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ , we may have a bit of trouble defining what quality is, but we all know it when we see it. And just in case we don’t, we have the Google toolbar with its PageRank indicator. You can download this very useful application at http://toolbar.google.com
Now, we don’t approve of spending our time obsessing about Google PageRank, but the higher your PageRank, the more highly Google thinks of your site. It is therefore self-evident that you ought to get inbound links to your pages from websites with high PageRank. Before you think we’ve stopped making sense, bear in mind that PageRank is named after Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. PageRank has nothing to with where your page ranks in the search engines, it’s the guy’s name. OK?
How we gather links
So, what we do is find links to your site from other respected sites around the net. The overwhelming majority of these will be from websites which coincide topically with your areas of activity. It might be from directories, where you should slot naturally into one of their categories. If you sell laptop computers, it might be from a site which sells laptop computer batteries or laptop carrying cases. Sometimes, if our clients have the will to do it, we will exchange links reciprocally with other sites.
What we will not do is charge around getting any old site to link to you. Nor will we just go on a flurry of mass link-building for two days every two months. Why? Because Google is very sophisticated at spotting that kind of activity and more to the point, Google knows what it is being done for, and it takes attempts to game its search results very seriously indeed.
Link gathering summary
So, there is a little bit of a conundrum here. Google advises you to improve your ranking by getting quality sites to link to you. It just doesn’t want you to do it too obviously, charging around like a bull in a china shop, in a frantic attempt to boost yourself up the search engine results pages. So we don’t. We play it safe. That way, you win.