Posted by admin in Uncategorized on 01 16th, 2006 | By Jenna Ryan – January 2006 – The Marketing Shop.com
There are a few ways to determine whether an incoming link has value or not for search engine optimization purposes. The goal is to create a natural linking pattern between you and the rest of the internet to make your website appear popular and to achieve real web popularity.
How do you detect which websites are worth pursuing for your website?
1. Is the website relevant to your website? Does the website cover topics that are similar to yours? Search engine crawlers compute each incoming link’s value based upon the relevance of the incoming link’s content in comparison to yours. If your website is about real estate and you have an incoming link from a gambling website, supposedly it is not a good thing and could actually count against you. The relevancy of the link is the first thing you should consider.
2. Check the Google Page Rank. Some linking experts claim that the rankings obtained from the Google Toolbar are grossly inaccurate. That is true, but still the Google Toolbar is one of the best ways I know to quickly judge a website off the bat, especially if you’re new to linking. Google ranks pages on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is a new site with little traffic. A ten rating is a MSN, Yahoo or Amazon. All the rest of us fall somewhere in between. Download the toolbar and see for yourself!
3. Get a wide variety of sites from every level. True, the websites with higher ranking than yours will boost your website’s ranking. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t want any links from low-ranking sites. You need a little of both in order to achieve the appearance of a natural linking pattern. I like to go after the high-ranking sites, and then I accept link exchanges from lower ranking ones. If you’re going to go for something, make it something with a higher rank than your site.
4. Make sure your link is on a page that can be indexed by search engines. Not every page is indexed by search engines. Some dynamically generated websites or database driven websites are virtually invisible to search engine crawlers and will never be found on Google and Yahoo. Don’t even waste your time with these links. The best links are those garnered from HTML pages. You can tell what a page is written in by looking in your browser bar. HTML pages will have extensions of html or hml.
5. Get a link that is only one click away from the home page. If your link is embedded deep into a website, many clicks away from the home page, the link is utterly worthless unless that deep page has a high ranking. Links that are found one click away from the main page will get some credit for the page ranking of the main page, and for the page ranking of the page on which the link rests (if any).
6. Don’t expect much from a long page with many links. According to many search engine optimization experts, the more links that are on a page, the less value each link has. Try getting incoming links from pages with 20 links or less on them.
