How Popular are You?

Inbound links are an indication of a website’s popularity to search engines.

When someone places a link on their site to yours it shows they value your content.

The quality of links is more important than the quantity. Your search engine rankings will get more of a boost if the sites which link to yours have related content & are highly ranked themselves.

Avoid link farms which are just pages of links to a multitude of different sites.

Some of the best links are from human edited directories like the Open Directory Project DMOZ which is very difficult to get a link from. The process takes a long time due to the sheer volume of submitted sites & the fact that actual human beings will look at your site & decide if it merits a link. A link on the DMOZ is a big thumbs up in Google’s mind & if Google likes it then most search engines will like it too.

You will more than likely have a lot of clickable links on your site. Some will send visitors to a different website (external) & some will refer to pages on your own website (internal). The text on your page which shows these links to visitors is called “anchor text” & it should be formatted in a particular fashion.

Your anchor text should always describe what it is you are linking to.

For example -

Whether you use capital or lower case letters in anchor text is not important.

Anchor text should never say “click here” as this is virtually worthless.

If you Google the term “click here” without using the quotation marks you’ll see Adobe.com & Apple QuickTime in addition to a number of other sites. The reason for this is that so many website owners have used the anchor text “Click Here to download Adobe Acrobat” or “Click Here to download Apple QuickTime” software. The result is that when you Google “click here” these sites show up on the 1st page.

Do you see how this could help you to own particular keywords & phrases?

Visit the Search Engine Watch website for more in depth link strategies.

Please leave comments if you find this article helpful (or not!)

September 10, 2008 · Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, Smart Site Design

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