For Google and Yahoo, one of the most relevant factors when it comes to deciding what websites will rank at the top is INCOMING LINKS. That is, how many other websites link to yours and which ones.
In this article I will talk about getting high-quality incoming links.
Quality over quantity
Having a bunch of links pointing to your website is good, but not as good as having some GREAT ones. Who links to you is a lot more important than how many websites link to you.
There are two main factors that are taken into consideration by the main search engines to determine how much each link is worth. The first on is the reputation of the website. A link from CNN is worth 100 links from your friends’ blogs (that is, if your friends’ blogs have very little authority).
The second factor is content relevant to your website. For example, if you sell shoes, a link from a website about shoes is more important than a link from a website about cars.
New links rate
This refers to how many new links you get every week. Google assumes that if a lot of people are linking to your website, then your website must have good information. However, Google is really good at finding out what links are legitimate and what links are not. If you were thinking about spamming blogs and forums just to get a lot of new links, forget it. It will actually hurt your rankings.
You need to understand that Google’s job is to provide good search results. Imagine searching for “red shoes” and getting results about blue skirts and black dresses. You will never use that search engine again. That is why Google doesn’t like it when you try to manipulate their results. You are messing with their business.
Do things ethically and you will get the results you are looking for. Don’t take shortcuts.
Anchor text
The anchor text is the link description, such as “Click here to see our collection of red shoes” or “Red shoes here”. If the anchor text has your keywords in it, Google assumes that the page the link is pointing to is relevant to those keywords.
Age of links
The older a link is, the more weight it has and the more is worth to you. Give people who link to you a good reason to keep that link forever.
Text surrounding the link
A lot of low-quality websites have a very common characteristic: they put a lot of links on one page that are not even related to each other. If you have your red shoes link in an article that talks about blue jeans is not nearly as good as having it in an article that talks about red shoes. Google got pretty good at analyzing words and their meanings. They can tell if a link is totally off-topic.
The other thing to keep in mind is that if a page links to 15 websites is not as good as if it links to your website only.
Page Rank
Although many people claim that Page Rank doesn’t matter anymore, it still does. It was a much better indicator a couple of years ago, but it is not worthless now.
The thing with Google Page Rank is that it is a little bit outdated. But it will still give you a good idea as far as how popular a website is.
The bottom line
Do things the right way. And most importantly, do the right things. Don’t buy/sell links. Post incredible content on your website and you will get many great-quality links. Focus on quality, not quantity. And create an amazing website for your visitors, not the search engines. If your website is outstanding and visitors love it, so will the search engines.
