Monthly Myth Buster:
All website links are created equal.
As you work towards optimizing your property’s website, you might become familiar with the term link building. Link building is an important search engine optimization technique which involves constructing quality inbound links to your website. There are several ways in which you can achieve this task. However, some of these methods are more rewarding and beneficial than others. In the process of deciding your link building strategy, you probably will encounter the popular misconception that any link to your website is a good link. In this month’s Myth Buster, RezNEWS will address common link building practices that if used, could turn out to be a waste of time, money, and energy.
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Why is link building important?
Link building is the process of placing a link to your web page on an external website. Link building is quintessential in increasing website importance. The more important a search engine believes your website to be, the higher up it will be in the search engine rankings. Simply stated, a link to your website is considered a vote and the more votes your website has, the higher rankings your website will receive. However, all links are not created equal. Many search engines use an algorithm, which combines your link popularity (the number of links you have) with link importance (relative importance of those links) to determine your website’s ranking in the search engines.
Myth: All links are created equal.
First and foremost, all links are not created equal. Since search engines place more importance on “quality” links, it is important to build relevant links to your site. A quality link is a link from a site that the search engine deems “important” or an “authority” site. Search engines rank web pages and authority sites and therefore give votes to authority sites more weight than links on non-authority sites. For example, if Fox.com links to your website, that single link might count more than ten links from small “non-authority” sites.
Myth: Any link is a good link.
Creating links that are of quality are the links you want pointing to your website. When creating link strategies, you want to take into account the other website’s page rank, how many other links are on that page, as well as the relevance of that page to your property. Look for websites with categories that pinpoint your property’s offerings, that have page rank of three or higher, and have minimal other sites also advertising on the page. If you are the only advertiser with a direct link to your website, you are not sharing any of that page rank with any other sites. This practice gives more weight to the relevance of your site.
Link farms:
Link farms are large websites that contain a large number of unrelated links. Link farms were created to allow people to get a large number of inbound links to their web page to manipulate link popularity. This technique may have worked years ago when the sheer number of in-bound links was what weighed heavily in search engine rankings. However, search engines are smarter these days and now calculate link importance into the algorithm for search engine rankings. Linking to link farms could be seen as “spamming” and this practice could possibly get you banned from a search engine. The reality is that link farms are a waste of time and will do nothing to help increase your website’s search engine rankings.
Partner sites:
There has been a lot of weight placed on having partner sites. Partner sites could or could not be links related to the lodging industry. Often times, these links are to other lodging properties throughout the country or the world. Some website marketing companies will link your website to other websites they are marketing though “partner sites” in attempt to increase page rank and positioning. In actuality, partner sites do little to increase page rank and search engine position.
Top sites to create inbound links from:
There are many sites, which have great page rank and are not considered authority sites. These sites are good if they are relevant for your business, but these sites still do not have the weight of some other types of websites. Having an inbound link on an educational website, government website, or chamber of commerce or visitors’ center website has much more position power than an inbound link from a local area lodging website. But that doesn’t mean to totally discount the area lodging website, as this link is more relevant for actual bookings than increasing position (which in turn increases bookings).
In conclusion
To have success in link building, it is important to have links, which are on “authority” sites and to have links where the page content is relevant to the lodging industry. It won’t serve you in a positive way to link to a page that is selling auto parts, as that link would be completely unrelated to your industry. Alternately, someone looking for auto parts is most likely not looking to book a reservation at your lodging property. It is more productive to concentrate your efforts on related and important links. Attracting sheer numbers to your website is no longer important.
This month’s myth, that all website links are created equal, is…BUSTED!
About the author
Erin Kuwitzky is the newest member of the RezStream promotion team and brings experience managing large, million dollar accounts in the advertising, tradeshow, and online marketing industries. Erin has worked for major agencies in the United States as well as Europe and brings the latest trends from print and online marketing to RezStream.
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