eoghan posted on July 13, 2009 20:00
It's common knowledge that securing links from other websites plays a key role in getting your website's pages into major search engines. CLUAS has been steadily attracting links over its 10 year lifetime resulting in a steady stream of people visiting CLUAS via these links and also - more importantly - ensuring we have an excellent ranking in the search engines. For example we have, for years, been the number 1 result for people searching 'Irish indie music' (and bizarrely also for 'Irish Jazz music'). But such searches are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. CLUAS receives a very considerable amount of its traffic from search engines thanks to - literally - thousands of different 'long tail' searches done by users each month.
So why does CLUAS rank above other Irish music websites when it comes to so many search phrases? There is a complicated answer. And a simple answer. The simple answer is: "links, and loads of them". Thanks to something I stumbled upon last week I can now visually demonstrate the "linking success" of CLUAS compared to other similar Irish music sites. I came across a tool made available by "Majestic SEO" (a company offering "Search Engine Optimisation" services) who started to trawl the WWW back in June 2007 and recorded all the links they found. To use their own words they have...:
"...crawled over 96 billion webpages and analyzed almost 697 billion unique URLs and their anchor text to calculate who link to who and with what anchor text."
They allow registered users of their site to compare websites in terms of the number of links they have attracted. The graph below (click on it to see it in higher resolution) shows the number of different domains that the Majestic SEO crew found over the last two years linking to CLUAS and compares it with the links they found for 3 other Irish music sites (Hotpress.com, State.ie and Nialler9.com).
Click to see graph in higher resolution
It is clear from the graph that CLUAS has attracted links from more domains (i.e. websites) than any of the other sites. This massive repository of sites linking to us is, if you ask, me a key signal used by the search engines when they decide to rank CLUAS above other websites. Building such a eco-system of links sure takes time, but we can vouch for the fact that once it is done the impact is considerable (and occasionally surprising...).
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