Why exchange Links? PageRank, Relevance, Link Popularity ...
Like with any business you need to get the word out about your product or service so people know it exists and also how to find it. To spread the word you could for example, advertise on TV, in print or on the radio. However, if you are on a tight budget and have just started out these options probably won't fit the bill. Luckily, if you have a web site people can also look for you on the internet using search engines. Ideally, you want to be found in the top search results for the keywords that match your web site's description. How well you will rank depends on a number of criterias and complex algorithms that differ, depending which search engine (SE) you use. For example, on Google your page might be among the top ten results, whereas on Yahoo you might be on the next page or vice versa.
Link building is one of the available major SEO tools that can be used or misused. They are significantly involved in how your site will rank in the SE's listings. If used correctly, they can be a powerful tool and extremely beneficial to your site's ranking.
Why another page dedicated to link building?
Everybody who is a webmaster and wants to sucessfully promote a site needs to think about SEO, of which link building is an important part. Out of interest and necessity we started looking into this matter realizing how many different approaches and interpretations there are.
There are many sites dealing with the subject of link building already, but some of the information is either outdated or frankly speaking misleading. Admittedly, search engines are constantly tweaking the way they assess a page in terms of importance and relevance, partly to account for any weaknesses that could be exploited to artificially improve a sites ranking, and they won't tell you every little dirty secret. Therefore it's not always easy to be up to speed and it's impossible to know exactly what's going on. All the so called SEO experts have to admit that part of their job is guesswork, trying to figure out what it is that triggers certain behaviours. It's only natural that Yahoo, Google & Co. won't let you in on every tiny detail about how their system works.
But there are a few common and well documented approaches to iincreasing your direct traffic and improving search engine rankings that are sure to work. One of them is link building. To stay abreast of Googles recent changes in the way they evaluate your site's popularity it's important to grasp the concept of reciprocal and non-reciprocal linking strategies.
In this tutorial we aim to clarify the difference between one-way, non-reciprocal and two-way, reciprocal link building and want to show you how to use these strategies to your advantage. We hope you will find this article entertaining, useful and that ideas are generated from this little tutorial, snowballing into a massive explosion of link building plans.
Why is it good to trade links?
The main reason is of course to drive traffic to your site. If done right, link trading can increase the number of your visitors by the thousands. The main effects of having a lot of links out on the Internet pointing to your site are:
- People will find the link to your site and click on it while visiting the sites you have made a link exchange with. The more popular this site is, the more visitors you can expect to find your site.
- Search engines will favour your site if a lot of other quality sites are linking to it. This will have the effect that your site is going to show up early in the search results. This in turn will of course mean that more people can find it, hence more visitors.
- Most search engines have what is called "spiders" crawling the Internet "hungry" looking for sites to put in their databases. These little programs will more easily find your site if many websites on the Internet point to your site!
How Search Engines examine you web site
One of the ways search engines determine your site's relevance and importance is to look at the number of inbound links (pointing at your web site) and their quality (reciprocal or non-reciprocal). If these links are reciprocal then the search engine will also assess its relevance to the theme of your site. These factors determine a page's ranking in the search results, the more important and relevant a page is seen by the search engine, the higher it will rank.
Relevance is measured in regards to a search "query string" or keywords used in a phrase. The higher the relevance of such a string to a web page, the higher this page would rank. Keywords and query strings appearing in your web page's content improve relevance to that keyword phrase. Keywords appearing in the clickable portion of an incoming link (anchor text) also contribute to your page's relevance.
Why is Relevancy important?
NOTE: Search engines "like" differently worded anchor tags, as they figure that inbound links that all have the same description could have been created artificially with the sole purpose of improving your site's ranking in the search results. For example, if you had 500 pages pointing to you and they were all using the same text in their anchor tags (which is highly unlikely), then this could either be a huge coincidence or a sign of artifical link building. For higher search engine acceptability it is desirable to have the sites pointing to you use different titles and descriptions. This is something to bear in mind when thinking about using other link building strategies for example, directory submission or when you have a resource section on your page where people can submit a link-exchange request, more info further down this page.
Imagine the following situation: You are running a casino site and have a link back from a Pharmacy related site. Now when a visitor goes to that health site chances are very low that this person, who is looking for health and pharmacy related information, will ever come to your site.
- Importance of your web page is assessed by employing various algorithms. One prominent aspect would be links coming from sources that are deemed to have a higher authority in a particular industry. They add both, "relevance" and "importance" to your site. To our knowledge there is no tool available to the public to clearly identify a source or document as being "authoritative".
The PageRank-algorithm was developed by Google founder Sergey Brin and Larry Page, hence the name "PageRank", and is a process to determine the link popularity of a document and a page respectively.
Link popularity describes how many hyperlinks point to a given webpage. The more a page is linked to the higher tits link-popularity will be. However, link popularity is not used by search engines in this form anymore to evaluate web sites.
Google looks at more than the sheer volume of links a page receives, it also analyzes the page that is linking. Links from pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
The PageRank influences how a site will rank in Googles search results. It is not the only factor used by Google to rank pages, but it is an important one. Click here to download the Google Toolbar and find out the Google PR of your site. The green bar below "PageRank" indicates the PR of a web site.
In order to get closer to the top and improve your position in the SE's results page you should definately make the link building criteria an important part of your SEO strategy. This can be a very effective yet inexpensive way to help your web site grow and get exposure.Search engines take into account the number AND quality of the web sites that point to you. Therefore, having hundreds of low quality sites linking to you won't help you. In fact, being associated with a lot of link farms or blacklisted sites can actually harm your site. Also, if links from your site to other sites considerably outnumber inbound links, then all of them might be ignored and won't improve your site's ranking at all. The key to success is a carefully balanced amount of links to web sites that have been thoroughly examined beforehand to meet relevance and quality criterias.
How can you tell the good links from the bad ones? What are the different ways to get links and which one is the best?
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