What Types of Links Should My Business Try to Obtain?

admin — Sat, 30 May 2009 19:24:45 +0000

What Types of Links to Obtain

Here it goes.

I’m going to try and give a basic tutorial on the VERY important topic of linking, and how it can help your site thrive in the search engines [and ill try not to be as boring as possible].

Having high quality links inbound links [we'll get to what those are in a second] pointing to your site, and the structure and quality of the links you have on your site is possibly the most important thing you can focus on with your site to increase it’s value in the search engines. You can think of links from other sites kinda like votes in the eyes of search engines. The more quality votes you have compared to your competition, the more you are going out rank them and have more traffic.

Different Types of Links

Before we go over what types of links your website should try and obtain, I’m going to go over some basic terminology:

Inbound Link – Alink from another site pointing to yours.
Outbound Link – A link from your site pointing to another site.
Internal Link – A link on your site pointing to another part in your site.
Page Rank – The rank (0-10) of a particular site and a key part of indicating its authority in the search engines.
Link Juice – How much of a site’s authority is passed on to your page by the site linking to you.
Authority Links – A link generally in the same topic as your site with a considerably high reputation and Page Rank
Reciprocal Links – A two inbound links pointing towards each other’s sites.
Follow Links – A link that passes it’s “link juice” to your page by linking to it
No-Follow Links – A link with a [rel="nofollow"] tag in the link, indicating that it will not pass “link juice” to your site.

Out of all the diffent types of links, the inbound link is best put as what should be the “meat and pototoes” of your entire SEO campaign. These are the links that the search engines weigh the most heavily when ranking your site and determining your own site’s Page Rank (or PR).

What Makes a Good Inbound Link?

There are quite a few factors that go into evaluating, and getting, a good inbound link that is going to have significant impact on your site and it’s ranking in the search engines. The biggest factor that qualifies an inbound link as a good link is it’s “authority” in the search engines. Normally, a site’s authority can be established by it’s Page Rank and how old the site is. If the site has a high page rank and is from the mid to late 90’s, it’s going to be a great link for your site to have, and is going have a significant impact on your site’s authority.

For instance, let’s say that you own a website dedicated to proving that Coke is by far a better soft drink than Pepsi [...please don't sue me, Pepsi..]. So, Coca-cola sees that you have a site that promotes their product in a light that is good for their image and decides to write a piece about your website in their blog and to link to your page. Coca-cola’s site has been around since about 1997 and has considerable Page Rank of 8 out of 10. This is probably one of the best links your site can get.

Another thing that you want to look at is how many other sites are they linking to on the page that has your link on it. Everytime I talk about this particular part of linking, I give this analogy and people seem to think it makes sense. Guys, let’s say you’re in a bar at the end of the night, and you’re trying to get a girl to come home with you at the end of the night. Do you want the drunk and half passed out girl that would probably go home with anyone just because it’s last call, or the more selective girl that you might have to actually have a decent conversation with? The smarter ‘ choice would be to go after the more selective girl, cause let’s face it, you’re only young once and who wants to get herpes…

As crude of an analogy as it might be, the same goes for looking for the right inbound links. You would rather have a site that gives out links to a select few, as opposed to a site that will give out links to anyone. This also factors into how much “link juice” a site will pass to your site once it links to it. The fewer the links, the greater the value for your site.

Outbound Links and Why They are Important

I’m not going to spend too terribly much time on this topic in this post, but the one thing that should always be kept in mind when linking to another site is whether or not the link you are dishing out on your site is going to provide valuable content to the visitors on your page. Always think about your visitors before you endorse another site by linking to it because it’s content is directly going to affect your authority in the eyes of your site’s visitors.

Why Excessive Reciprocal Linking is a Bad Idea

In a nut shell, reciprocal linking is linking to another site based solely on the fact that they are going to link back to you. While this may seem like an okay practice, reference what I said about outbound links. The links you put on your page should only be links that you think your visitors are going to find helpful. If this doesn’t apply with who you are trading links with…just don’t do it. You should always think about your visitor’s experience first. Also, some reciprocal links DO occur naturally, so don’t be freaked out if they appear in the link profile for your website.

In an interview with Matt Cutts, who works with the Search Quality Group in Google, he had this to say about reciprocal links: “Reciprocal links do occur naturally, and it’s not a thing to be surprised about. So, what we mean when we say avoid excessive reciprocal links is if your portfolio has a very large fraction of links where you’re getting them by sending automated emails saying Did you know that exchanging links can help your rankings in search engines? That’s not a basis for fundamental long term, solid growth of your links if that’s all you are doing. So, we tell people to avoid excessive swapping; and the nice thing is that people have a pretty good idea of what excessive is. So, you add a word like that and people are going to understand that it’s natural that reciprocal links happen in the course of being on the web at some point, but it’s not that I have to chase after those too much.”

If You Write Good Content, They Will Come

When it comes right down to it, the best links you can get are ones that you don’t seek out and come organically. If you write good, engaging content…the links will flow in over time. The basis of all good SEO techniques is creating a website that people will find useful, and have a good experience with when they visit. If you do that, people will naturally want to spread the word about your site