There are a couple of very good reasons that links are an important search engine optimization technique:

#1: Inbound links can boost your search result rankings

Up until about 3 years ago search engines would determine your website ranking primarily on the on-page factors. Factors such as keyword density and meta-tag information. It didn’t take long for hucksters to game the system. Webmasters would stuff their pages full of keywords by adding lines of irrelevant keywords at the page bottoms of their sites. Many of them would format the text color of these stuffed keywords to match the page background color. That way human visitors would not see this list of totally irrelevant words, but the search engine spider that crawls the code would. The idea of course was to get a better ranking on lots of search terms.

The websites with good and original content often didn’t concern themselves with SEO, these websites dropped to the bottom of the search results pages. The outcome for the people searching for something was bad. They might be searching for “contractors” and end up on a pornograhic website.

Link Sniper

Today search engines, such as Google, look for the quantity and quality of incoming links to your website to help determine the relevance and importance of your website. Each link coming into your website is considered a “vote” for that page. The websites with more votes will have a greater potential for ranking higher in the search engines. Votes from highly trusted websites are the highest ranking votes. An incoming link from a page rank 6 website is valued more than a link from a page rank 3 site.

Incoming links play another important role in your page rankings: They can help to determine the keywords for which your page will rank. If a website links to yours using the anchor/link text, “SEO link building”, then the search engine assumes they are saying that your page is relevant to “SEO link building”. You get one “vote” for “SEO link building”. If there are many links/votes from different sites that use “SEO link building” the search engines will assume your page is extremely relevant to that topic. The next thing you know your site will be ranking high for “SEO link building” in the search results.

#2: Links will bring more traffic to your site

Beyond the fact that incoming links will boost your search engine rankings, they will also bring additional traffic to your website. Some webmasters form a myopic view when they begin to optimize a website. Their thinking is that if the link doesn’t improve their SEO score they are not interested in hearing about it or fooling with it.

Lets assume the reason they are trying to improve their SEO score is to get higher rankings in search results and higher rankings will bring more traffic. If you have an incoming link from another website that can give you more traffic, then it’s a good link! It shouldn’t matter necessarily if it will boost your search engine rank. In many ways that link can give you better traffic, especially if the other site is relevant to your site.

Here are a few questions about link-building that I often get :

Q: Should incoming links be to my homepage, or should there be links to other pages on my site?

A: Search engines may suspect something is wrong if every link points to your Home page. If you have interesting content on your site, people will link directly to the page with the content and not to your Home page. When you are building your incoming links, you should attempt to get about 30% or more pointing to your website’s internal pages. This is called “deep linking”.

Q: Are some links better than others?

A: Yes. Higher quality links better than low quality links. Link quality is based on four primary factors:

1. The rank and trust factor of the website that is linking to you. For example, The Drudge Report versus a  random news website.
2. Where the link is located on the webpage. Links in the top 1/3 of the page are better than on the bottom 1/3. Also, if there are only four links on the page opposed to 50 links.
3. The anchor text relevancy: “Remodeling Contractor” versus “Click Here”.
4. The page the link is on in the website structure. Is the link on the Home page, an internal relevant topic page, or some insignificant page like an “Associates” page or “Link To Us” page.

In the next article I’ll explain how and where to get high quality links.

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