Importance of Links in SEO

Friday, 26 February 2010

Why Links Are Important

Most likely the word best associated with Web is ‘links’, as hypertext is nothing more than linking to pages you like and be linked by pages that like your website. The Web in fact consists of interrelated pages with spiders following the links as they index the Web. In the lack of numerous sites linking to you, search engines will hardly find you, and even if they do find you, it is highly improbable to have a good placement, as when determining relevancy, search engines rely on the quality and quantity of the links, as part of their algorithms.

Inbound and Outbound Links

For SEO, two kinds of links are important, inbound and outbound links. Outbound links consists of links from your site leading to another one, and inbound links, also known as backlinks, are links from external sites leading to your site. For instance, if a .net links to yourdommain.com, that particular link from a .net is an inbound link for yourdomain.com.

Backlinks are highly important as they are believed to measure the popularity of your website on the Web. Remember, that not all backlinks are the same as there are good backlinks and bad backlinks. Links from highly regarded places, if possible from sites with similar content, are considered good backlinks and they will help you get a higher search engine ranking. On the other hand, links from doubtful sites, such as link farms, are considered bad links and should be avoided.

If you don’t have sufficient backlinks, you might as well buy links as this is a common practice and it is something worth of your consideration. However, if you prefer something to be free, Web directories such as http://dmoz.org or http://dir.yahoo.com are some excellent places.

Start with searching for appropriate site to backlink with the Backlinks Builder. Once the possible backlinks are identified, get in touch with the Webmaster of the site on the terms of getting a backlink. You might get a link exchange deal when thy will place N number of links from their site to your site and you will subsequently place N number of links on your site to their site. Please note that this is far being a good deal and you should avoid it as much as possible.

Internal links – links on the same website from one page to another – are important as well, although not as important as backlinks. In this contest, yes it better for the design to have images for links, but is a SEO disaster. Use basic text link rather than buttons for links within your site. The search engine spiders are spidering text on the page and not the fancy images or flash animations. Thus, try not to use them, instead give significant text description in all <alt> tag as much as possible.

Anchor text

Anchor text is crucial in every backlink. As it is important where a link is coming from – the location of it, from a highly regarded place, or from a link farm, the text itself a link starts from is even more important. Basically, anchor text is the word or words you click on to open a hyperlink. For instance, in the best search engine the words ‘best search engine’ in the anchor text for the google.com hyperlink. Consequently, if you have a backlink from a suitable site, but with an ‘total failure by all means’ anchor text, it will not be much help for you.

As you are looking through your backlinks, it is recommended to also check their anchor text an if contains any keyword. It is excellent for SEO to have a great number of backlinks from valuable sites with the keywords included in the anchor text. An excellent tool to check the anchor text of your inbound backlinks is the Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. The text surrounding the anchor itself is also essential.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

Just like with keywords, it is not recommended to buy a massive number of links. Buying 1,000 links in a couple of days will raise distrust and suspicion. What is even worse, search engines monitor link farms selling links in bulk and because buying links is a method to influence the search results, this action will be penalized by search engines. Stay away from link farms s they are not doing you any good at all. It is also recommended to avoid having outbound links from your website to spammers or other bad guys on the Web.

As previously discussed, link exchange is not the best deal. It might improve your ranking, but on the long run it has many disadvantages. To start with, the other partner might remove certain links to you or might modify the context where the link is displayed. In addition to that, it is very distrustful to be closely connected with a site with 50% or even more of your links, both inbound and outbound, being to & from that location.

Another aspect regarding links is the proportion of inbound and outbound links. Usually, if your outbound links greatly exceed the number of your inbound links it is not good, but that might vary from case to case. For instance, for a site linking to news sites or RSS feeds, well the large number of outbound links is the price you pay for fresh content.