Every now and again we here at ImaginedAtom will receive the same question from many different clients: “Why is a link to your website at the bottom of mine?” The answer to this isn’t really a simple one, but one that should be answered for all of the wonderers out there, looking around the interwebs, wondering the same thing.
First, it is not advertising. Sure, there may be a few people who love the websites we’ve designed and happen to click on our link at the bottom of a client’s website, but the numbers are few and don’t result in many new leads for web designers. The real reason that link is there is to help your website as well as ours in search engine results. That’s it. The end. Explanation provided.
But it’s not so easy as that. Google, Bing, and Yahoo! use complex algorithms, or equations, to calculate how to rank a website in their search results. If you were to search for “New Orleans Web Design” on Google, the results will change almost monthly. The reason for this is because search engines are always recalculating how a particular website ranks (or scores) using their algorithm. The methodology behind this in Google’s case is called “Page Rank”. And websites are ranked based upon a number of factors such as quality of the content, the frequency the site is updated, number of visitors to the site, overall readability and compliance to Web standards, and most importantly by the number of links to the site.
quoteSo that little text link at the bottom of your site helps your online reputation tremendously, and will actually pull your website higher in search results.
So, in order for our design agency to rank higher on Google, we would need to have a large number of inbound links from other websites to push our rankings higher. And the more links that come our way, the more trusted we are in the eyes of the search engine. This is how our clients start to benefit.
If ImaginedAtom has a high number of links to our website and is ranked accordingly by the major search engines, every page and site that we link to is also looked upon more favorably. (If this sounds a bit like a pyramid scheme, you aren’t alone in this. Blame Google and Bing, not us!) So that little text link at the bottom of your site helps your online reputation tremendously, and will actually pull your website higher in search results.
That in effect, is really all there is to it. A greater number of links to a particular website gives that site more online credibility, and in return all of the sites that link to it are also given a more favorable search ranking.
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ImaginedAtom, LLC is a New Orleans website design company specializing in HTML5 web development, custom graphics, print media design, and WordPress development.
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