May 20th, 2010 by Dan

When most site owners think about link building, they think of the hard work of tracking down potential link sources, ferreting out their histories, and building relationships. The appearance of their own website probably comes into things as a glancing consideration, if it comes in as a factor at all. Yet the appearance of your website can have a big effect on whether people link to you.

Most link building strategies rely on the linking site being interested enough in yours to send some traffic your way. The decision to provide a link can be made as casually as the decision to glance at your site, and can be rejected in as casual a manner. Every effort needs to be made to ensure that any potential linking site is going to be impressed.

Appearances build trust

Appearances add to people’s perception of you, whether it’s their first contact at your office or their first glance at your website. If your appearance doesn’t match their expectations, the wrong impression is created. When it comes to online business, the impression could be one of incompetence, shady dealing or even simply off-topic. They say that you never get a second chance at a first impression, but on the internet you often don’t get a chance for a second impression either.

We make decisions based on a website’s appearance all the time. For example, if you perform a search and click through to a site that has a black background, neon borders and five different fonts, you assume that the site is amateur and possibly even hazardous for your computer. These assumptions become even more important when you’re link building. At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk we can provide you with advice on the right link building services for your business.

Small touches make for a pristine presentation

There are basic things you need to get right to present the right appearance for link building:

- Design. Your design needs to fit in with a linking site’s preconceptions. It’s a good idea to look around your industry if you’re unsure of the standard.

- Grammar: Very few people have perfect grammar, but most people achieve a certain level. If your SEO content reads badly, linking sites are likely to assume one of two things. They may suspect that your level of ability is low, and therefore the information on your pages is potentially incorrect. More likely, they will assume that your content has been written by a program, and that your site is a spam site. Neither of these impressions is what you want to convey.

- Spelling: This is number one on the list of the most common on-page errors, and also the number one appearance detractor. While a site user may miss a grammatical error while scanning a page, they’re quite likely to pick up on a spelling error. If you do nothing else, it’s a good idea to have your content read by several people to check for these kinds of errors. It’s amazing what a good sense of spelling can achieve.

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