Web Marketing

Building Quality Links

Building quality links is often the quickest way to improve search engine rankings on your website. The major search engines place emphasis on link popularity when ranking sites. While some believe that the number of sites pointing to your site is what determines your link popularity, and the more links there are, the higher your ranking will be. However, that is only partially true. The search engines (and those who program them) are intelligent. They are used to search engine spammers trying to cheat their way into getting a high ranking. Because of this, the search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a site, but the quality of those links. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is – and search engines like popular pages.

Authoritative Links

The challenge for most sites is to accumulate enough incoming links to appear relevant to the search engines without contravening any one of the many spam filters and penalties that are applied to sites that cheat. So, the secret to getting it right is to research your links carefully. While it's true that almost any relevant link from another site will add some value to your page popularity, the most effective links are those from authoritative pages. Google considers these pages important within their Page Rank scoring system - the higher the Google Page Rank, the better the link. Directory examples include Yahoo and DMOZ. Other sites like National Geographic or BBC would be exceptional authoritative site links regardless of topic since each has been assigned a Page Rank of 8 or better on Google's ten-point scale.

Relevant Links from Trusted Pages

As authoritative links usually only account for a small number of your site links you need to acquire the majority of links from pages that are trusted. Trusted pages are sites that have been indexed for a while and have already been assigned a Google Page Rank of 4 or better. It helps considerably if these pages match the topic of your page. Links from relevant trusted pages can give your site a significant boost in rankings. If you do gather links from sites with a page rank less than 4, then the relevance of the topic becomes even more important.