Fewer Links. Greater Profits?

Much of SEO seems to be focused on links these days, link exchange, link building, link popularity, and so on. It is true that many of the search engines consider a site’s links when determining that site’s ranking in search results. In essence, the search engines view a link to your site, or inbound link, as a sort of popularity vote in your favor. The more inbound links you have, the greater your popularity votes and thus the better your rank in the search engines.

But are all these links really worth it? Is it possible to have too many links? In order to get inbound links, you often have to reciprocate with outbound links. But this can be taken to the extreme. If your site has hundreds of links to other sites sprinkled throughout your pages, all these links may be doing you more harm than good. Ideally, your website should be designed so that it leads your visitors through a series of steps that ends with them doing what you want them to do. This may be purchasing a product or, when it comes to cosmetic surgery marketing, contacting you and becoming your patient. If your visitors are overwhelmed by hundreds of links and the hundred different directions that they can go in, you’re most likely confusing them and getting them no closer to becoming your patient. Worse, clicking on those links takes your visitors out of your site. All those links may be helping you in the search engines, but they may not be helping your conversion rates.

As such, fewer links could very well equate to a more profitable site. With fewer links, you can keep your site focused. Your visitors have fewer options and fewer places to click on. In many cases, fewer options are far better, giving your visitors more time to spend on your content and on your site. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have any links at all. Instead, try limiting your links, particularly to quality links. After all, Google considers not just the number of links you have, but the quality of those links as well. A great suggestion is to keep your links on one page that is titled Links’ or Resources’. This keeps the links from interfering with the rest of your site. You can sprinkle some links throughout your pages, but avoid having them on your homepage.