subject: How To Do Search Engine Optimization - Linking [print this page] How to do search engine optimization relies heavily on linking using keywords. The way people decide whether a website is cool is by linking to it. So that gets back to the idea of Google being quoted.
The way websites say that another website is important is they might have a link on their website that points back to this website. It can be an image link in a banner for example or a text link or even just the url. Basically any link that points back to the website.
We've started on the article website, we post an article, on the blog website we might post a comment or two, on one of the forums we post another comment. Within that comment we might put a link back to our website. For example, to an article we might reply and at the end say we might say Damian from our soccer website. Once again, creating a vital link back to the website we are trying to optimise.
To the blog post he might reply to someone else's post and say Yes, I think Ronaldo is the best soccer player Damian from yourdomainname. Effectively what we're doing is getting all these other links on websites pointing back to our website which is increasing and improving our popularity which in turn help our ranking in a search engine.
Now, even though we are posting these links in all manner of ways, we are effectively engineering that popularity because we are making these posts. What Google is trying to do is try to replicate what happens in nature. When using what happens in nature and applying to whats happening here, just because we say our own website is cool doesn't necessarily make it so. However, according to Google, a website is more popular if other people are linking to it (not just ourselves) and it therefore holds more weight in the popularity stakes.
Let's say Nike had a link to our soccer drills website. This link from Nike is going to be so much more important than a link from the 12 year old boy down the road who just bought a new pair of shoes and thinks their cool, because Nike is an already respected website as apposed to 12 year old Jimmy Smith's blog. Nike already has a lot of other people linking to the website saying it is important. There, if someone who is already a top ranking site and is exceedingly popular links to your site, they are essentially saying you are worthwhile too. And there opinion holds far more weight than your average Joe. These are the links you are really looking for as they are what Google searches for and adds more importance to when running a search.
Based on an analysis of where your links are coming from determines how popular that website is based on the sort of links you are getting. Sometimes you will find one link from Nike's website could be worth thirty or forty links from these other websites. It is better to get links from these websites but it's harder. How to do search engine optimization comes down to a balance between volume and quality of links.
