SEO Blog

In the SEO business we often go on about the importance of building your inbound links. Not without good reason admittedly. This is where you’ll get your PageRank, your site strength and help your website get ranked. But what’s the point in linking to a half-cocked website?

It is a difficult one though. There’s always a temptation to get your site on Google’s radar and get those first links set up; nothing wrong with that at all. But before you embark on a full blown link building odyssey, you need to get your house in order.

One of the first things that you should have in place is the design and basic site navigational infrastructure. The design will provide a common theme and provide an aesthetic background to everything you produce whilst the navigation is at the centre of everything. Your site needs this kind of structure; it will be vital in helping visitors and search engine crawlers to get around your site as well as mapping out what fits in where.

Your website needs a bit of substance too. Fill the pages with content and optimise it all for your keywords. As well as helping your visitors grasp the purpose of each page (hopefully also encouraging them to delve a little deeper in the process), content provides relevance. We’ve been through this a few times (including Are You Taking Your Content Seriously Enough?), so I won’t go into too much depth.

But content is one of those important on-page aspects that really should be dealt with before you begin really working on building your link profile. Ideally it should be in place before a site even goes live, ensuring that it is ready for visitors and spiders. You can develop as you go, but this could damage you long-term chances. For instance if somebody lands on you and clearly sees that your site is under construction, why would they be inclined to return?

You should be focussed on creating a fully developed website. That means having Meta, Alt tags, images, design, navigation, headers and content all sewn up. You can’t cut corners in SEO, just as you can’t with customer service.

If you’re panicking about getting a few new links, your time might be better served on your own site. Of course there is a point at which you have to go out and be proactive about developing your link profile too, but that comes when your house in order and ready to receive guests.

If your site is in disarray, you won’t get any benefit from your links. Equally, if you have an amazing site that has great content on every page but no inbound links, you’ll never get found. This is why it’s recommended that you get all of this core work on your website done upfront. Take that out of the equation and then get on with your other SEO work, not least improving your inbound link profile.

Your site can never be fully optimised though, so you will continue revisiting your website elements and optimising them as well as finding links. This fine tuning is what helps sites turn first page rankings into top 3 rankings.