Posted by on June 18th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Link Building Overview |
Nothing beats the value that link building contributes in search engine optimization. Increasing the number of high quality websites that link to your own site is vital to any search marketing campaign. It provides a lot of both direct and indirect benefits that can enhance your presence on the Internet. There’s no doubt that Google gives heavy consideration to the number and quality of links that directs to your site when it comes to ranking your web pages in search engines.
External Backlinks
Search engine algorithm identifies the value of links to determine the popularity, importance and relevance of a web page. Search engines like Google classify links into two categories: internal and external links. When it comes to the value between these two links, Google puts more weight and consideration to external links than internal links. Although internal links are still important, Google carries out the principle that what others say or think about you is more significant than what you say about yourself. But this doesn’t entail that you can ignore having good internal link structure or disregard improving on your internal links.
Advantages of Backlinks
Definitely, a direct advantage for having a huge number of external incoming links pointing to your site is that the more sites linking to your pages, the more online traffic your site will get and the wider the target audience your site attracts. Link building would be even more effective if backlinks are located in sites that attract high traffic themselves, have high quality content, and are within your industry or niche.
Another advantage of having a high level of backlinks, albeit less noticeable, is that it makes your site more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines. Search engine algorithms regard inbound links as votes of confidence. This means racking up more links increases the level of trust and power behind your site. Trust is an essential force behind any website’s successful search marketing efforts. Building trust with search engines is very important if you are competing for rankings and establishing dominant online presence in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. However, you can only accomplish this if you carefully select the right kind of quality links.
The Right Kind of Links
Always remember that a search engine’s algorithm can discriminate among the links leading to your site. There are good quality links that can greatly contribute to your link building efforts, and there are also bad ones. To become effective in driving more traffic to your site, you have to discern which backlinks can give your site the leverage to rank better in search engines. So how do you determine which links are worth pursing? How can you judge the value of a link?
Link Popularity, Relevance, and Trust
Having valuable backlinks helps your search engine optimization process to progress smoothly because it provides your site the sure-fire path to better ranking opportunities in search engine results pages. A valuable backlink that helps your site climb the SERPs must have high quality. Moreover, gathering high quality links will depend on the level of trust and relevance of the web sites they are found and on the popularity of your links.
Search engines have just recently placed more significance on metrics about an entire domain rather than an individual URL or page, making it now possible for new pages or even sites with very few links to rank highly because they are connected with important, trusted and well-linked-to domains. Based from this, you can see how being linked with certain domains will surely propel you own site to higher rankings. Having backlinks from other domains that have high levels of authority and trust signals search engines that your site is considered a potentially important resource of those trusted sites. Your site will be seen as valuable if your site have links from other valuable sites. Also, attracting links from websites that have content relevant to yours cues search engines to consider your site an influence within your niche or industry, pushing you further to higher rankings.
Link popularity also plays a vital role in boosting your rankings. Basically, if the links to your pages are considered popular and attract a lot of clicks, it also means that your site is considered popular and important by search engines
Anchor Text Relevance
As mentioned earlier, when looking for sites that will link to yours, it is always important to check their relevance to your content. Make sure that the page that links to your site is relevant to the page within your site that you want to link it to. See to it if the other page’s content is related to the keywords in your own target page, especially if that other page uses related keywords in locations that Google finds important. Check for keywords in the following locations of the page that can be accessed through the View Source command: domain and URL, title tag, heading tags, the body of the text and HTML, and the incoming links pointing to the page itself.
Your goal is to check if the page can be considered as relevant by search engine and if it also related to your own page. The relevance of the anchor text is one of the most important elements in determining rankings. As an attribute of links, anchor text is a critical metric that passes ranking value to a page. Furthermore, search engines give more ranking value that can be passed to “exact match” anchor texts rather than target keywords that are just inserted in an anchor text phrase. For instance, if your page contains a comprehensive article on how to maintain cars, and you are planning to get inbound links from a web site selling car care products, you need to check if the page has exact related anchor texts such as “car maintenance,” “maintaining your car,” etc., rather than “These cheap car care products will help maintain your car well.”
Link Juice, Link Equity, and PageRank
In your link building efforts, it is also important to look at link equity and link authority or “link juice.” Link equity is a component of PageRank, which is an important part of off-page search engine optimization. Link equity refers to the number of incoming links to any given page on your web site. On the other hand, link juice or link authority is the underlying value of the links. This is also referred to as domain authority, which describes the measure of importance, popularity, and trustworthiness of any page in a given domain by the search engines. Google considers the domain where you earn your links from as important as the individual metrics of the page passing the link.
These two combined influence PageRank, which is not directly related to how high you’ll rank in search engines. PageRank is a measure of a website’s popularity on a scale of 1 to 10, with PR 10 being the highest. PageRank functions under the principle that a link pointing to a web site is considered as vote or endorsement for that site. The more votes your site gets, especially from sites that have high PageRanks themselves, the higher your PageRank and popularity. To determine the PageRank value that is being passed, you have to identify the innate PageRank value of a page and the number of links on a page. If a page has a PageRank of 8 it can pass on and link out to two other pages, those pages will carry PR4 each. Thus, the more links on a page, the lower the PageRank value it can pass on.
Therefore, to make your site popular, you need to earn as much links as possible from other web sites that have substantial link authority, with sizeable inherent PageRank value, and have pages with less links to maximize the level of popularity and trust your site can gain.
Permanence
It goes without saying that the permanence and sustainability of links also play key roles to your search engine optimization process. Link building is not just a matter of immediate boosts in your page attributes or site popularity; it should also be in line with the long-term sustainability of these effects. The quality of the site where your links are earned from should not only be the focus, but also consider if those links will stay there for a long time. Once your links are gone, the effects are gone as well. It is important to pursue links from a site that’s just longer periods of time as the site and link mature.
Also, try to avoid buying links most of the time since you can only buy them out for a definite period of time. It won’t be worth it since you will just spend more money to renew and maintain your links on a site.
Link Positioning
Links can appear in different locations on a page; it can be on the header, footer, sidebars or in the body of the content itself. However, when search engines analyze a page for different sections, they assign different weights to content or links according to their location. In general, links placed at the top or beginning of the page are deemed more valuable by search engines than links on the footer of the page. Moreover, links that are occur naturally within the main content of the page carries higher value than any location. This means that links placed in articles as anchor texts that lead to your page have more weight than links placed at the end of a featured content. Thus, it is important to place your links at the top/ navigation header of the page or within a paragraph of the main content as much as possible.
Other Link Evaluation Factors to Consider
Finally, you should also take into account the cost of acquiring a link and the probability of acquiring a link. Issues like how much time and effort do you need to spend to earn a certain link must be thought through to become more effective and efficient in your SEO efforts. You should ask yourself: Is it worth it?
Also, you need to be realistic about the likelihood of acquiring a link from a web site. There are other factors that influence the possibility of actually earning a link. Do you have what it takes to earn a certain link? Can you add a link directly or submit it without strings attached? Can you easily make revisions or additions to a linking page? Also, do you have an existing relationship with the owner or webmaster of a certain domain? If you do, it would help a lot.
