Why It’s Important To Build Quality Links

In a crowded market place such as online gambling, every single portal casino is forever searching for links; not just any link but links from authoritative sites.

In this article I’m going to give a brief overview about the history of links and how to attract quality links to your site.

It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when Google did not exist on the Web. A time when one could simply type in a few words into the search box and all manner of content and keywords would pop up. In principle, this is how most websites are found on the World Wide Web, which continues to grow at a prodigious pace every day.

The more websites we built in the past, the better we became at it. However, a vital component to these sites were still missing: traffic. Building websites wasn’t the hard part of the job but trying to get visitors to them was. You’ve most probably heard this famous quote, ”If you build it, they will come.” It doesn’t matter who coined this phrase but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Because build it we did but come they didn’t.

Enter Google

More to the point, nowadays everything begins and ends with quality content. Yes I know that this saying has been beaten to death already and most webmasters including myself are sick and tired of hearing it. But it’s the truth, quality content in tandem with quality links is the vehicle that’s going to bring the traffic to your site.

In 1998, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, developed an algorithm that’s largely based on social network analysis and network theory. Basically Google had the ability to analyze the web’s complex graph structure based on the links that pointed to them. One can say that it was the gold rush all over again, only this time everybody was searching for a backlink instead of gold.

Anything that can be clicked on that shuttles people from one website to another constitutes a link. The development of all forms of linking types has never improved on the original. No amount of cleverness will ever change one universal truth: The less useful your content, the less likely someone will link to it.

Just like a fingerprint, your links tell Google about your site. Who links to you and how they link to you is now one of the most important factors that all search engines rely on when they rank a site. It didn’t always start out this way. The web’s first search engine, called Wandex and the engines that followed (most of them no longer exist), didn’t analyze links at all. They only analyzed your website. As logical as it might have looked at the time, it didn’t take long for web marketers to figure out how search engines worked, as such they started to manipulate them.

Once the online marketing community discovered the power of links in Google’s ranking algorithm, the Web became a proverbial war zone. A top-ten listing at Google for a competitive keyword or phrase can drive hundreds, even thousands of visitors to a portal casino. Remember gambling.com? In 2005 former owner Graeme Levine sold this portal casino for $20 million.

Problem is, not all links are equal. Some are more equal than others. And some are infinitely more equal. Search engines apart, one link can send more traffic than another. There will always be good and bad links. But, within Google’s algorithm, the quality of links vastly outweighs the quantity. This is why it’s important not to try and artificially inflate your ”link popularity”-what Google gives, it can surely take away. 

”Gambling.com is the number 1 listing on google.com for “Gambling” search and has over 500 other internet and affiliate sites linking to Gambling.com globally. It also has extensive expertise in direct mailing and has built a double opt-in database of over 200,000 members.”

Renowned SEO expert, Mike Grehan said he noticed that in cowboy movies, the good guys always wore white hats and the bad guys black hats. The industry has become fixated on getting links, in itself this is a dangerous thing. Link building is a combination of understanding how complex algorithms work while applying the gentle art of persuasion.

A good online marketing plan is usually the byproduct of developing a long-term, quality link-building strategy. A few links from the right places are better than a ton of links from sites with no value. Link building is both an art and science.

If you own a website, then no doubt your inbox is spammed with loads of emails, as Eric Ward puts it, ”I’ll link to your nonsense if you link to mine.” Ten to one you’ve most probably received offers from offshore companies offering you to get you a certain amount of links each week for a set price per link.

But before you even seriously consider this, I want you to go to your own website right now, write down ten good reasons why you should link to your own website. If you find yourself scratching your head after four or five, ask yourself this question: If I can’t think of ten good reasons to link to my portal casino, what makes me think that other webmasters would?

The Importance Of A Proper Link Building Strategy

Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ generate links by the millions as people connect, share and communicate. The web has changed from a web of things to a web of people. At the end of the day it’s all about connections; the way in which we link to one another. You can build quality backlinks by doing the following:

• Regularly carry out competitor analysis and link audits.
• Develop a structured long-term link building strategy. I firmly believe that slow and steady always wins the race. Link building is an arduous process that takes time. If you build loads of links within a short period of time, Google frowns upon it and will penalize your site.
• Identify and approach quality top-ranking websites with a value proposition. If you ask an authority site such as Casinolistings.com to link to yours, it must be mutually beneficial to both parties.
• Always operate within Google’s quality guidelines.

Conclusion

Building quality links to your site starts with amazing content. It’s important that you have a sound knowledge of all the processes associated with link building. Not just the big picture but the bits and pieces as well.

Links on the web determines the level of success your site will have. In addition to humans clicking on those links, every search engine ”bot” (search engine) uses some form of link analysis when determining your site’s placement in the SERPS (search engine results pages).