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Link Value is Like Real Estate – Location, Location,
Location!
by: Joel Carlson
Think quality over quantity to make your link building easier
Unless you're just starting out in learning search engine
optimization, you should already know that the quality of search
rankings for your website directly correspond to the quantity of
links pointing to your site from other sites. That’s true as a
general statement, but it also makes sense that search engine
algorithms do not blindly weight all links the same.
In using links as a primary weighting factor, search engines are
really trying to extract the honest, unbiased, expert ‘votes’ from
the Internet community about which sites are the best resources
on a given subject. Search engines are not perfect at this of
course, but if you keep it in mind while building links to your site,
you will make yourself far less vulnerable to future search engine
algorithm updates. Lets take a look at some of the primary
factors search engines use to determine the value of a link:
The theme of the site your link is on tells a lot about how well
qualified that ‘vote’ for your site is. For example, it follows that a
link to your lawnmower site from a site dedicated entirely to lawn
care is a more knowledgeable recommendation than the same
link coming from a site that’s dedicated to travel.
The contents of the page your link is on will also affect the value
of it in the eyes of the search engines. The more closely related
the linking page’s theme is to your own, the more weight will be
given. The same logic applies as above in that an article about
finding the best mowers will provide a far more relevant vote for
your lawnmower site than an article about places to visit in
Singapore.
At a finer level, the surrounding text around a link will affect its
value as well. Perhaps your link is on a travel site inside an
article on places to visit in Singapore. The writer visited
Singapore and found an amazing new Chinese-produced
mower that can only be purchased online through your website. It’
s commonly believed that having your link directly surrounded by
related content will also boost its value, although to a lesser
degree than the previously mentioned factors.
The last key factor, the actual anchor text of the link, is still
extremely important to what terms your site ranks highly for.
While this is slowly becoming slightly less dominant of a factor, it’
s still the number one most important factor that search engines
look at to determine how your site should rank for a given
keyword phrase. As often as possible arrange to have the anchor
text of the link pointing to your site include the keywords you are
targeting. The easiest way to do this is to choose a domain
name with the keywords in it. It will be much more reasonable to
arrange a link to your site with the anchor text ‘lawnmower deals’
if your domain name is www.lawnmowerdeals.com than if it
were something like www.joeslawncare.com.
In the end, all you really need to do is to keep in mind that the
search engines are constantly striving to find natural, honest,
expert ‘votes’ for websites and those votes will be given a great
deal more value than those links that appear to be purchased or
manipulated in some way. So seek out links from relevant
content on relevant sites. Provide good interesting content and
services that people will want to talk about and recommend and
you will find that the number of links you actually need to get to
the top of the search rankings is very often far fewer than you
think!
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