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22 January 2010
Posted in
S.E.O
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Link building is important to S.E.O. and always has been. Why? Because, even though search engines use many different factors to determine page rankings, the amount and quality of links is one of the most significant factors. You will find if you review the site ranking factors on www.seomoz.org, 4 of the top 5 ranking factors are to do with linking, keywording of the anchor text of links scoring the top spot.
There are many important concepts to link building, one of them being link diversity. Link diversity is a measure of how many of your links are from different sites. 100 links from just one site is significantly lesser in value than 10 links that are all from different sites. It may be easy for some to create a thousand page website that has a link to your site on every page, but it would be very difficult, expensive and time consuming to create a thousand different sites that each has a link to your site, so we can strongly advise that you don’t just try to do this yourself, just try to have as much good content as possible to attract people to link your site.
As well as link diversity, you also need to look at link popularity. Link popularity is a complicated mix of link quantity and link quality. Basically, not only is it the amount of links you have, but the link quantity of the sites that have linked you. If there is a site that has a large amount of incoming links, and they post a link to your site, that link is worth much more. If a site that has a very low amount of incoming links, or no incoming links, posts a link to your site, it is worth very little.
Now for some info on the next factor, domain trust. In order to avoid manipulation of the search engines, domain trust became an important factor. The thought behind domain trust is that if you have a large amount of links from fully trusted sites, then your site is considered to be fully trustable. Likewise if your site has lots of links from spam-ridden or manipulative sites then your site is considered a spam site or a manipulative site, and not trustable. So try to make sure that these manipulating sites do not make up a large proportion of your links.
The final factor, the one that I mentioned scoring 1st place for factors affecting page ranking, the link anchor text. The more links that you have with relevant keywords as anchor text, the higher your page ranking will be for those relevant keywords. For instance with Adobe Acrobat reader, most sites have .pdf files on them and will display text saying something along the lines of, “Adobe acrobat reader is required to read this document. Click here to download”. As a result of that, the Adobe Acrobat reader page uselessly ranks fist for the search keywords ‘click here’. Linkers often use part of the URL or company name. They may use what your company does, but it is more likely to happen if you put that in your URL. While the area under discussion is anchor text, this also can be manipulated with hilarious results, or for political reasons. This is called Google Bombing. When searching the term “miserable failure” way back in 2006, the first result was George W. Bush, followed by other former presidents on the web pages of the American “white house”. This has happened several other times as well, some of which were eventually corrected by Google’s algorithm updates, but this is a fantastic example of how important link anchor text is.
All of these factors link together in a way that is made to mimic human behaviour while on the net. You need some useful and interesting information on your site to attract visitors and linkers, so to get good page rankings you need to keep your site and info up to date, keep it fresh and keep it real. But don’t forget the most important thing, you need to concentrate on keeping the visitors on the site for a while, and trying to convey your business is good enough for them to be a customer of yours.
