Making your website attractive - why is it important to build links?

It's a crucial part of organic search engine optimisation to build strong referral links to your website. The more referral website links you have to your website, means the greater your chance of higher search engine rankings. In fact search engines see links as ‘votes’ for your website.

Search engines are generally of the opinion that if lots of visitors find your content interesting enough to link to it, then your website must have something useful to offer. Search engines are always on the lookout for 'interesting' sites to display in their top ranking results. Hence the more links you have, the more likely search engines will give you a higher ranking.

However, don't be fooled into thinking that requesting links from just anybody will make your website more popular. When we talk about link building, we're talking about attracting and getting good, quality links from industry partners that you are happy to be associated with and that will add some gravitas and weight to your own website.

You should aim to get quality referrals from:

• People in the same sector, experts or suppliers
• Charity sites, educational organisations, people you support / sponsor
• Industry bodies and associations
• News sites
• Blogs and forums
• Social media and bookmarking sites

If possible suggest the link to your website to your referrer – search engines weight the actual ‘anchor text’ that forms the text link to your website.

Try and include at least one of your core keywords as the link. For example, “My favourite search engine optimisation partner” - where the text links to the URL of the website. However, links from different websites should be varied to aid natural searching.

Link to your own website pages frequently from your own Blog or Social Networking sites, using your website keywords.

Above all you need to encourage people to want to share content from your site. Your website is nothing without it's content and unless you keep your website up-to-date; write good, clear textual content; and provide interesting gimmicks, such as videos, no one will be attracted to your website.