The Ins And Outs Of Search Engine Optimization
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009Though some people will tell you that search engine optimisation is one of the dark arts of the Internet, it is not. Every search engine has to use what information it can to accurately rank each website.
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 an achievable feat to be ranked higher that a site with 4000 links with only 400-500 links pointing at your website, as long as they are better links based on the criteria of that search engine’s algorithm. As these search engines become more and more complex, the link quality criteria is getting stricter and stricter.
Ideally, your backlink (the link pointing to your page from another site) should meet the following criteria; the site that the link is on should have a related topic to your site, on a page that has a title that’s similar to your keyword, th actual clickable text of your link needs to be the keyword that you want to be ranked for (this is crucial).
It would be much better for you if you could receive these links without having to link back because that would make the link a one-way link as opposed to a two-way or reciprocal link which are worth a lot less in the eyes of the search engines.
As the algorithm of the major search engines gets more and more complex, they develop things like trip-filters for if a website gets too many links that all say the same thing (they will penalise this) so you want to change the anchor (clickable) text that you’re using around every fifty links or so.
I would recommend adding a maximum of one hundred link a month to try and stay within the limitations of the search engines. If the links are of a good quality as described, then it should be doing wonders of good for your website.
