Linking, SEO, eCommerce and You (Oh, and some money)

Linking is one of the fundamental ideas behind the world wide web. By having a vast collection of data which one can surf through using links, the way in which people store, present and find information has been revolutionised. Now, if you were actually to try to use just links to navigate around the web, finding a website could take days. Try it for yourself; get from bbc.co.uk to ebay.com using just links (i.e. no searching). Had fun for the last hour or two? Good. For this reason, links are now secondary to search engines; if you want to find information quickly then a search engine is what you use. 

Linking is Dead, Long Live Linking 

So, if we don't use links to find websites anymore, why are they so important? It's down to the way search engines rank websites. To a search engine, links are still the basis of the internet. If a website has hundreds or even thousands of other websites linking to it then there is a fair chance that that website is important, relevant and a good resource to direct people to. If all of those links relate to a certain keyphrase, say 'Holidays in Italy' then it's a pretty safe bet that when someone types 'Holidays in Italy' into a search engine, this is exactly the kind of site which they want to see. 

Links and SEO

As those acquainted with search engine optimisation will know, it is the method of organically improving search engine rankings . From the above, it should be pretty clear that building links is one of the key aspects of SEO. It is only by bulding links from authoritative, well ranked sites that search engines will begin to place importance on an eCommerce website. This is a time-consuming task, key phrases must be targeted within links and the links must be relevant, otherwise their value to a search engine is dramatically reduced. For example, if the links to the site about holidays in Italy all came from pages about UK car insurance firms, the site won't rank very highly regadless of the number of links compared to a site linked to by, say, the Italian tourist board's website and an Italian wine review site. Any eCommerce site which wants to make an impact on search engine rankings needs to employ SEO and as part of that process should be building quaility links.