How Links Affect SE Optimization
If the word keyword is the word that you hear most often in SEO, then links or linking would be the word that you will hear second-most often. Links have as much, if not more weight with search engine crawlers than keywords do.A web site without links is like an uncharted island to quote one of my articles.
This island could be sitting right there in the middle of the ocean, littered with diamonds or plants that grow that can heal disease. It doesn’t matter what this island contains if no one knows it exists.
Do you see where I am going with this? The same is true of your web site… it doesn’t matter how great the site looks, the information that you provide, or the products or services that you are offering if people can’t find you. This site is as good as the undiscovered island.
Your first purpose of links or linking will be to connect your site with others that are relevant to the information that your site provides.
Links will provide the method to which traffic to your site is increased… isn’t this the reason that you are playing the SEO game?
Your desire is to increase the traffic to your site, which in turn increases the number of products that you sell, the number of leads you collect, etc. In short, links lead to increased profit and growth. Of course you’d want to use them on your site.
Snagging Inbound Links
Most of your web sites in cyberspace have links that lead to other web sites.The links that leave your web site are important, but they are not nearly as important as the links that lead to your site. Links that lead to your site, called inbound links or backlinks, are viewed by search engines as votes for the value of your web site.
The more inbound links that lead to your site, the more weight the search engine crawlers will give to your site, which in turn equates to better search engine ranking. Anytime that your site is being voted for, you will want to have as many of these votes as possible.
Inbound links are such an important part of a linking strategy that some organization find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It is a good thing to know where your links are coming from, and one of the places you can gather this information is from a web analytics application.
My suggestion would be to get Google Analytics at the following link
http://www.google.com/analytics/
One of the most effective ways to find potential quality linking partners is to mimic the efforts of your most successful competition. What works for your high ranking competition, can also work for you, and any web page that links to one of your competitors is a prime candidate of yours for linking to your site as well.
Because the number of QUALITY inbound links play such a large role in the Google organic ranking algorithm, you should put together a list of web sites that link to your top performing competitors, focusing on the pages that target the same audience that you intent to target.
Once you find out where all the links are coming from, you can attempt to acquire links from those sites to yours.
One of the oldest methods for gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved are.
Then you contact each one of the sites that you discover and ask them to link to your site. Of course giving them a good reason that benefits them is always a plus. So you are not discouraged, you may put in a large amount of time into requesting links, for a relatively small return on your efforts.
Another great method is to offer articles to companies to freely use as long as they include information at the bottom that credits you and provides a link back to your site.
There are always web sites that are looking for good content to include in their pages.
I will be covering the additional methods to gain those inbound links in your final lesson,
7 – Getting Unlimited Traffic to Your Site. For now, you need to know how to locate these sites that you can gain links from.The easiest FREE tools available to find your competitions backlinks are the search engines themselves.
Google and Yahoo provide you with a way to find all the links that are pointing to a particular web page. You can use Google’s link query and Yahoo’s linkdomain query tools to allow you to find the sites that link to any other site.
For the Google link tool, go the
http://www.google.com/,
type “link:yourdomainname.com” in the search box replacing “yourdomainname.com” with the one that you want results for.
This will return the search results for all the web sites that Google considers relevant links to your web site… see below!
For the Yahoo linkdomain query, go to http://www.yahoo.com/, then in the search box type linkdomain - followed by the web site in which you want results for.
Evaluate Potential Linking Partners
One of the most important factors to consider is the age of the link domain you are trying to acquire a link from.Google tends to treat older domains that have been around for several years with more respect than domains registered recently. If you can acquire a link to your page from a domain that was registered in 1995, it is likely to have a greater effect on our organic rankings than a link from a domain that was registered last month.
To find the age of a domain, navigate to www.domaintools.com,
enter a domain name in the Whois look up search box, then click search.
Once your results appear, scroll down the page to see the age of the domain from the Created date.
You should also try to acquire as many links as possible from domains with .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. The search engines know that these educational and governmental establishments are much less likely to link to low-quality pages than a typical .com or .net domain. If you cannot find any.edu or .gov links to directly link to you, try to find pages that do have a large number of .edu or .gov links and prospect those site owners for a link.
You may want to consider examining other factors when analyzing potential linking partners. Make sure that sites you are trying to acquire links from have incoming links that are relevant to their own content. If so, that site is likely an authoritative and trusted resource for that subject matter.
Also you should acquire links from high traffic pages.
Visit www.alexa.com, click on the link at the top, Site Info.
Enter the domain name of the potential linking partner into the search box, click on the Search button; then click on the Get Details button when the page appears. The more traffic the site receives, the lower the Alexa number is. Aim for sites with Alexa rankings of less than 100,000.
Creating Outbound Links
The subject of outbound links has often been debated. There are some who worry about leaking PageRank – what (supposedly) happens when you link out to others. No one knows for sure exactly what mix of elements is considered when your page is ranked by a search engine. However, it’s safe to say that if you have only inbound links and no out-bound links, it can’t look good for your site.The best plan of action is to have a balanced mix of inbound and outbound links.
Your site visitors will expect to see some links leading to other sites on the web, whether those links are simple resources to help them find what they need, or something else.
You should also have some favorites out there that you find helpful and that you think others will find helpful, called your Blogroll on your blogs sidebar. When you’re creating your outbound links, keep the following guidelines in mind to appease search engine crawlers, because even though the main target for your links should be your site visitors, search engines will pay attention to your links, and your search ranking could be affected by them.
- Keep your links relevant – That doesn’t mean that you can link only to pages that are in the same industry as your own; but if you do link outside your industry, make sure there is some logical reason for sending your visitors in that direction. Search engine crawlers examine the content of links closely, both in the links that are created within text and in the actual URL of a link, as much as in the content of pages that are linked together.
- Be careful who you link to – Don’t link to low quality sites, because some search engines will penalize you for that. If, however you link to high-ranking sites, you’ll gain even more traction with search engines… the outbound links on your sites are under your control, so choose wisely.
- Don’t create pages that contain only links – When search engines see pages that contain nothing but links they read them as spam pages. If you must use a resource page, be sure to include descriptions of each link that you include on the page. Better yet, avoid this practice altogether if there’s any way you can.
- Monitor links and update broken ones – A broken link is worse than not having a link at all. When you link to a page and don’t check back on the links periodically, things could change… companies go out of business, web sites can change or disappear altogether. When the search engine crawler follows the links on your page and finds a broken link, this reflects badly on your site. If the broken link is there for a long time, the search engine could reduce your ranking because it appears that you’re not maintaining your site properly.
A Linking Strategy to Stay Away from… Link Farms
If you’ve ever landed on a page with links ordered neatly around the page, and with little or no text explaining all of the various links, then you’ve landed on a link farm. These sites are collections of links that lead to other web sites, or sometimes to other link farms.Link farms are not good strategy for improving your search engine rankings. Search engines don’t like link farms because they offer no information that’s of any value to the people who perform searches. For that reason, link farms are usually delisted as soon as they’re discovered.
Using Internal Links
Internal links are those that lead people from one page to another within your web site. This is different from the navigational structure. Internal links are more natural links that occur in the text on your web pages.Without a good internal linking strategy, you run the risk of not having your site properly crawled by the search engine spiders. You should have links that lead from part of your content to another important element on your site (such as an archived article or news clipping), so site visitors find that moving through the information they’re examining on your site is a natural process that takes place without too much difficulty or thought.
The most effective methods of internal linking are as follows:
- Inline Keyword Text links – These are links that you can use anchor tags and keywords to link to other pages on your site (anchor tags will be discussed in the next lesson, Lesson # 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags!). Use keywords for your text links as often as possible: (Text is displayed as a link instead of the URL for the link being displayed.) Using the phrase Click Here won’t gain you any leverage with a search engine crawler. Using a link that reads Rhino Bicycles, when that phrase is one of your key phrases will help improve your search engine ranking as long as the link leads to a page that truly is about Rhino bicycles.
- Links within the footers of your pages – Footer links are a common linking strategy that usually takes visitors to some element of the site’s administrative functions. See below!
Whatever you do with the navigational structure of your web site,
always avoid using back and forward buttons. Not only are these buttons
frustrating for users who want more options than just forward and back,
they’re also a red flag for search crawlers that your site may not be
user-friendly. Take the time to build a navigational structure that
gives your visitors the options they want for moving around your page
and finding the information they need.Remember the Basics When Link Building
It is important to remember that quantity is not nearly as important as quality while you build your link structure. Your linking strategy will be far more successful if you create links (both inbound and outbound) that are of high quality. When you link to other sites from yours, make sure that their site is more popular than your own. The same goes for inbound links… try to make sure that the links pointing to your site from another’s site is more popular than your own. Link building will be an ongoing process that you’ll work at for the lifetime of your web site.Next lesson: Lesson # 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags!
– Lesson # 4 Will be Covering the Title tag, Description tag, Keywords tag, Anchor tag, Header tags (h1, h2, h3), Text Modifiers, and the Image Alt tag… Don’t Miss It!
Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)
Google analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/Google & Yahoo Link Queries (find the sites that are linking to yours or any other site.)
Go to http://www.google.com/, then in the search box type “link:” followed by the web site in which you want results for.Go to http://www.yahoo.com/, then in the search box type “linkdomain:” followed by the web site in which you want results for.
To find the age of a domain, navigate to http://www.domaintools.com/
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