February, 2009

Effective Websites Newsletter

This issue contains articles about the other half of search engine optimization that is often forgotten—getting links to your site from other websites. Although often overlooked, it's a crucial part of boosting your search engine rankings. Read the article immediately below.

And see the short article on protecting your website from unwanted solicitations in the column at right.

Dave Salahi

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Boost Your Search Engine Rankings with Links from Other Websites

Getting your website to place highly in Google and other search engines requires work not only on your own website but other websites as well. The things you do to your own website (on-page factors) have to do with the content of your pages and the structure of the HTML code on your site. Off-page factors consist of just one thing: getting links to your site from other websites. Optimizing both the on-page and off-page factors is essential to get your site to show up in the first two or three pages of Google results. In this article I will be discussing the practice of link building; i.e., getting links to your site from other websites.

One of the things that search engines look at when deciding how highly to rank a website is the number of links to the site from other websites. Each link from another site to your site is like a vote for your site. The more popular your site is, the higher Google and other search engines will place your site in the rankings. This makes sense since a popular site is more likely to be useful to a searcher than one that has few links to it.

You can get a rough idea of your site's popularity by checking its PageRank with the Google Toolbar. You can get the free toolbar by clicking the toolbar link in the previous sentence and clicking the "Download Google Toolbar" button. Once you have the toolbar installed in your browser, simply go to your website's home page and check the PageRank indicator to see where you stand. Here's an example:

In this example, the page in question has a PageRank of 6 on a scale of 10, a fairly good ranking. You can learn more about PageRank from the Wikipedia entry on the topic.
To boost your PageRank you want to get as many links as possible from other sites to your site. However, not all incoming links to a website are weighted the same. Various characteristics of the website that the link is coming from determine the value of the link. Links from websites that are themselves popular and authoritative are given more weight than links from sites that are not. This relates to Google's TrustRank. The specific factors that go into establishing a site's TrustRank are closely guarded but it's safe to say that popular sites with high quality content are ranked more highly than low traffic sites with poor content. In particular, beware of link farms whose sole purpose is to try to artificially create links without any real value.

In addition, the content of the link text is important in determining its value to your site. Link text is the underlined text that forms the hyperlink. In the previous paragraph "TrustRank" and "link farms" comprise the link text of those two links. Link text that relates to the content of your page is rated more highly than text that does not. Consider, for example, a music store's page on musical instruments for sale. A link to that page containing the words "music" or "guitar" in the text is likely to rank higher than links with some unrelated word or the ubiquitous "click here." For this reason, it's important to get links to your site that contain your targeted keywords whenever possible (and to avoid the unhelpful "click here").

There are several other factors that help to determine the quality of a link, including the number of links on the page, the placement of the link on the page and the link age. The more links on the page that a link is coming from, the lower the value of the link to the target page. The thinking here is that if only a few links exist on a page then the links on that page were probably selected more carefully and they are likely to be more relevant to the page's topic than if the page contains dozens of links.

There are two aspects to a link's location on the page that are relevant to search engine optimization:

• how close to the top of the page it is
• whether it's in the main body content or some peripheral area

In general, search engines rank text near the top of a page as being more important than text at the bottom. As usual, this makes sense because the most important content on a page is likely to be near the top of the page. Think of a newspaper article's inverted pyramid structure. The other aspect of link placement that is important to SEO work is whether the link is coming from a part of the page text that is most concerned with the page's primary topic. If so, the link is rated more highly. By contrast, a link in a sidebar or a footer, for example, is less likely to be considered highly relevant to the page's main topic.

Finally, links that have been in place for a long time have more value than newly created links.

Conclusion

One manual for search engine consultants has this to say about the importance of link building:

"... it's virtually impossible to rank highly for any but the least competitive phrases without some links leading to your site. In fact, the major search engines are unlikely to even crawl your site with any depth or regularity if it doesn't have links leading to it."

So, if you hope to get your site to rank near the top of the search results you need to have an ongoing campaign to build high quality links to your site. This involves finding other sites in your field and related fields which are willing to provide links to your site, perhaps in exchange for a reciprocal link. One way to get links to your site is to write articles in your area of expertise to be published on other websites in exchange for a link to your site. When offering articles to other websites, it's important to choose sites that are relevant to your own field. And, you don't have to write a new article for each website. As long as you don't sign anything that makes an article exclusive to a single site, you can and should offer the article to dozens of other sites.

Another way to get links is to find directories of sites to companies in your business and ask to be listed. To find directories do a search for "directory your industry"; e.g., "directory web design." Also, consider local business listings like Yahoo Local.

As you conduct your link building campaign be aware that the link acquisition rate is also important. It's actually better to build links gradually, over time, than to try and get lots of links right away. The reason is that gradual link building is something that happens naturally with high quality websites that persevere over a period of years. By contrast, websites that pop up overnight with hundreds or thousands of incoming links are almost always spam sites. So, start your link-building campaign now and then keep it going for the long-term.

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What Are Your Questions?

What are your burning questions about internet marketing? Call me at 949-362-0842 or email me at dave@artistic-webdesign.com with your questions. Or fill out a one-minute survey on our website. Then watch for the answers in an upcoming issue of this newsletter.