subject: Search Engine Optimisation - Let's Talk About Links [print this page]
Because search engines are all about delivering the most relevant results for specific search queries, they all look for signals of relevance, popularity, trust and expertness (or authority) amongst the pages in their indexes. Ensuring that your site is well optimised technically and in terms of content is an important part of SEO. However, in order for this stool to stand, it needs its third leg its expert status.
But how do search engines decide which sites are experts in a particular subject area, and which are not?
When Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin began piecing together how hyperlinked documents (like the WWW) fit together, they developed PageRank. Effectively, PageRankmeasures the relative importance of a page or document within the set. While PageRank uses numerous variables to do this, one of the most important aspects of PageRank is that is looks at links. And indeed, where these links come from and where they go. Each link is seen as a "vote" or a citation for the page it's linking to. So links from sites which are already seen as being an authority (like .edu or .gov top level domains), will count for more than links from a link directory.
Not all links are created equal. Some are more valuable than others, and certainly those that appear to be organic and natural are worth more than those gathered from link exchanges. And it's not only the links into your site that matter, who you link to is also very important.
Within your site too, the way you link (and virtually silo related content) is an important part of your on-site SEO. You internal linking strategy should provide easy access to your content for your human visitors and search engines. Ensuring adequate linking to top-level pages also gives search engines a good indication of what your site is about as well as what's important. It's vitally important to pay attention to your links' anchor text too. The anchor text of a link refers to the actual words that are hyperlinked, and these should contain keywords that describe the page to which they link.
To summarise, there are three types of links that you should be focusing on developing to boost your SEO performance: inbound links (from external sites), outbound links (it matters who you link to, experts link to experts!) and internal links.
Be wary of the company you keep, and develop links with relevant partners in the same or a related vertical to yourself.
Finally, try to encourage deep-linking to your site; don't just build links to your homepage. Remember that natural links from within a site's content are more valuable than links on a link-exchange page. Avoid link farms and paid links it's never worth it.
Search Engine Optimisation - Let's Talk About Links
