The “World Wide Web” is sometimes confused with the ‘Internet’, for perfectly understandable reasons: However, there is an important distinction: The World Wide Web is a network of linked documents, which rely on hypertext to connect them. The Internet is the technological networking toolkit that is used by the World Wide Web in order to function effectively, and to enable the array of interlinked documents to be accessible to users around the world. Hypertext is a form of text which contains references to other items of text in the form of links to those items of text. It was integrated as ‘hyperlinking’ in to computing in the early 1960s by, amongst others, Ted Nelson and his assistant Calvin Curtin.
Hyperlinking is the at the core of the internet and its functionality. Without it, the intricate spider’s web of documents and rich media that make up the internet, could not exist.
However, as well as being instrumental to the daily functioning of the internet, hyperlinking is essential to the way search engines rank order search results. During the 1990s, whilst studying at Stanford University in California, Larry Page and Sergey Bryn, came up with a brilliant innovation for assessing, with some degree of objectivity, what makes one internet document more relevant than another: Count the number of links from other sites to that document. The document that receives more links than others should, in principle, get a higher search results page ranking than the document that receives less links from other websites. Page and Bryn of-course went on to become the founders of Google, with this process of ranking sites (now known as “page rank”), one of the revolutionary search engine’s unique selling points.
Whilst the algorithms which determine the ranking of search results are always changing, mind-bogglingly complex, and to some extent “black boxes” that resist probing by curious researchers, search engine companies do acknowledge that page rank, as a means of ordering results, still plays a key role.
Here at Optmization.co.uk we are well aware of the value of page rank when it comes to search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is the process of fine-tuning, or even significantly modifying, a website to the extent that it is in optimal condition for gaining the highest possible search engine rankings. We specialise in integrating SEO in to websites in a thoughtful, carefully planned and holistic manner. Increasing the number of links your website receives, or link building, is one highly effective service we offer, as part of our suite of SEO services.
We steer well clear of the more dubious link building practices, such as “link spamming” – the process of bombarding users with numerous links to various websites in bogus blogs and online articles.
For example, we will make use of respected web directories, carefully researching the most appropriate ones for your website. When we submit your links to these directories we will contextualise them with the most suitable keywords, increasing the sense of authority they convey to search engine indexing software.
Finally, we will consider whether social networking is a suitable vehicle for SEO link building. For instance, we can link to your website through judicious, well-written blog comments and twitter postings.