Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) takes hard work and a lot of experience. The Search Engines (Google in particular) are usually the major sources for new visitors to Websites (for non-paid visits i.e. organic visits). It therefore makes sense that SEO activities revolve around getting a high ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) which means having your Website appear in the first few results on the SERPs.

Google, Bing, Yahoo and others are constantly tweaking their ranking algorithms and all say they take several hundred on-page and off-page factors into consideration when ranking. These several hundred factors are all good and well however the single most important factor of all is links (often called inlinks or backlinks). Links are considered a ‘vote’ for the destination Site and without other Websites linking to your Site, yours will simply not appear in a prevalent position in the SERPs. Of course, the Search Engines harp on about the importance of original content, age of the domain, geographic location, logical Site structure and so on however these factors pale into insignificance compared to links.

It is entirely possible to get a top position on the SERPs having a terrible Webpage with unoriginal content however with many links. Have masses of original content, a totally ‘search engine friendly’ structure but no links and your Site will appear nowhere near the top 100 results on the SERPs. Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google with the algorithm based on PageRank (in turn based on links) and little has changed in this regard; Google still uses links as the most significant ranking factor relating to Search Results.

In conclusion, if there is only one SEO activity you are going to undertake for your Website, make sure that activity is getting as many links to your Site as possible!

By: Gary Eckstein

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