The Ins And Outs of Search Engine Optimization
Although some would have you believe that search engine optimization is one of the Internet’s evils, it is in fact seen as necessary by the search engines as it organizes the information on web pages to be more clearly readable to their spiders, allowing them to rank websites more effectively.
In basic terms the search engine can only do so using how your page looks & additional information about your site that it can collect using spiders. This additional information consists of what is basically a popularity contest. The more links that you have to your site the higher up the rankings you will be.
It’s actually far more complicated than that, but that’s the general gist of it. The reason it’s far more complicated is because links are not all worth the same. The value of a link can depend on several factors, like the PR (PageRank) of a particular site or page, the title of the site or page, the subtitles on the page, the actual clickable text of your link, whether or not you link back to them etc. there are far too many factors to list here, but there are a few.
It is possible to be above a site with 3000 links to it with only 300 – 400 of your own if they are better, high quality links. As search engines evolve they can rank links on an increasing amount of criteria. This means that it is important for you to aim to add quality links to your site wherever you can. This will have the effect of future proofing your link campaign against any algorithm amendments that may occur in the future.
In an ideal world, the back link you receive (your link from another site) should be on a page where the title is similar or related to the subject of your website, their website should really relate to yours as a whole, and the anchor (clickable) text of the link should be the keyword that you want your site to higher ranked for.
What you are aiming for is to have these link placed without you having to link directly back. This is because two way (reciprocal) links have been seriously devalued by search engines. One way links are the most powerful kind of links that will really boost you up the search engine rankings.
You should change the keyword that you’re using for your link text every fifty or so links. This is because search engines have developed filters that can see if anyone has too many link to their site that say exactly the same thing, which looks unnatural to them.
Only add 100 links per month max to stay within the search engines strict guidelines, if they are quality links as I have suggested they will be doing your site lots of good in a short period of time so be patient always.
Popularity: unranked [?]
