Search Optimization SEO

Link Building for SEO, Part 1: Important Factors

Probably the most important component to ranking well in the search engine is accumulating inbound links, or link building. There are a number of issues that determine how successful your inbound links will be in giving you search engine traffic.

These include:

1. The number of inbound links.

2. The anchor text of those inbound links.

3. The strength of the pages that are linking to you.

4. Do the search engines give any weight to an inbound link.

5. How related the pages that link to you are in terms of your content area.

 

In terms of the number of inbound links, typically, the more the better. It is important, however, that the number of inbound links grows in a natural manner in relation to the age of your site and its current number of links. It would not be positive for a new site to suddenly generate a vast number of links in a very short period, as this would be indicative of a growth that was not natural and was somehow artificially accumulating these links to achieve better search engine rankings. As such it is best to accumulate links at a steadily growing rate, increasing the number gained on any given month through time as the site matures and accumulates a large number of links.

 

In terms of the anchor text, links whose text is the same as the keywords you are targeting will have a strong effect on your ranking for those keywords. It is important however, that the anchor texts of your different inbound links are not all the same. They should be varied so as to not appear artificial. You may target several keywords for any given page and have links with all the different keywords as anchor texts as well as variations of these keywords.

 

The strength of the pages that are linking to you is fundamental in determining your search engine rankings. The typical method adopted to measure the strength of a page is a metric known as its Page Rank (PR). This is a value between 0 and 10 (10 being the highest) that Google releases to indicate the strength of the inbound links to a page. The Google toolbar can be installed on your browser and will show you the PR if any page you visit. Many people believe that PR is a logarithmic measure to base 5 to 6. To put simply a link from a PR5 page may be 5 - 6 times more powerful than a link from a PR4 page, and so on. While PR is useful to get an idea of the strength of a pages inbound links, I believe there are some more useful ways to determine the strength of a link. Essentially, if a page ranks well in the search engines for a reasonably competitive keyword, in my opinion, a link from this page will carry a lot of strength. This may or may not correspond to the pages PR. Having a good number of inbound links, with relevant anchor text as well as a good number of links from pages with good PR or that have good search engine rankings will go a long way to getting you ranked well.

 

An issue to be aware of when link building is that some links are essentially ignored by the search engines. The most common form of these links have the code rel=”nofollow” in the link in the html page. You can see this by using the “view source” command in your browser and searching for the anchor text of the URL of the link. There are other ways a link will not provide SEO benefit, for example, if the code of the link is generated by javascript rather than being in the html, this is another example of a link that will not “pass juice”, so to speak.

 

Finally, another important factor in determining how strong your inbound links are is how related to your content are the pages that link to you. For example, if you have a site on guitar, it is not of a lot of value to have a link from a site that may be about, for example, sewing. This then ties in with the previous point that links from pages that rank well in the search engine will carry a lot of strength, inferring that if you can get some links from pages that rank well on keywords that are related to yours, with relevant anchor texts, these links will probably be some of the most important you can obtain.

 

So in this article we have detailed some important factors in building links to your site. In part 2 of this article we will now look at where you can obtain such links.