SEO Medical Knowledge Center
What are Links and How Can They Benefit My Online Medical Marketing?
Pages on the Internet are connected to one another through links. Your medical practice's website has many links within it, allowing visitors to easily navigate their way around. It's also common to have links pointing to other sites your visitors may find useful.
Links are also how search engines find your site and in large part, where they decide to place your site in a search engine results page. Building a high-quality cache of incoming links is probably the best thing you can do to boost your medical website's search engine rankings.
Basically speaking, if several high-quality sites are linking to yours, Google and other search engines will see your site as being popular and a valuable resource and want to display it prominently in their search engine results page.
What does a link look like?
Before delving into the different types of links, we should briefly explain elements of a link. Here's an example – online medical marketing .
There are two important parts to this link: the Uniformed Resource Locator (URL), or the web address of the page being linked to and the anchor text, or the visible text of the link ("online medical marketing" in this case).
The HTML code used to create the above link, or what one needs to include in order for it to work on your site is:
<a href= http://www.seomedical.com/ >online medical marketing</a>
Incorporating your keywords into a link's anchor text is one of the most important strategies you can employ to boost your search engine rankings.
What are the different types of links and which ones are more valuable?
Essentially, there are three different types of links a website can have. Some are more valuable than others while some are easier to obtain.
Inbound links are one type of link and are by far the most valuable to have. An inbound link is one from another site pointing to your homepage or another page on your site. Search engines see natural inbound links as a key indicator of a site's value and popularity. Inbound links from established sites carry the greatest value. A link from AP.com will be much more valuable than one from some free press release distribution site that most people have never heard of.
Outbound links are the opposite of inbound, or where you are linking to someone else's site from yours. There's not much benefit in terms of your rankings but outbound links can offer further resources your visitors may find interesting. In some situations, the site you're linking to may oblige you by linking back to you – which brings us to our third type of link, a reciprocal link.
Owners of websites sometimes agree to "swap" links with each other, which is known as reciprocal linking. You can exchange links one-on-one with another site but the benefit of doing this has greatly diminished in recent years.
There's even services, or schemes rather, that you can pay to help you grow links. Known as link farms, you exchange links with other websites that in turn link to you on a massive scale. Run the other way from something like this – Google will penalize your site if it's apparent you're using a link farm.
By far, a strong mix of "natural" inbound links will yield tangible benefits in your search engine rankings. While it takes time to build, your rankings will be best served by obtaining these types of links.
Bookmark us and check back again soon with the online medical marketing knowledge center for some more strategies on building a strong mix of "natural" inbound links.