What I Learned About Link Backs

Last week, we discussed ways to improve your website to achieve higher natural rankings on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Now we continue this discussion focusing on the value of link building to further improve your organic status.

While it is important to have a strong website, it is equally important to have a strong network of links leading to your website. In fact, one online marketing expert Ben Kirschner of Elite SEM estimates that 80% of your natural ranking is based on the strength of your in-bound links (with the remaining 20% based on your web site itself). If you hire an SEO consultant, after he or she spends a few months fixing your site, the majority of their efforts thereafter will be spent identifying opportunities to place back links.

So why do search engines place such a high premium on in-bound links? The answer involves the perception of your site as an authority. For example, if you gathered a 7th grade class' reports on life in colonial New York, you could look at the bibliography for each report and tally up how many times each source was cited. You would rank first the most cited source, rank second the second most-cited source, etc. Search engine rankings were similarly, only using the number of links to evaluate respective strengths of websites. The more in-bound links to you site, the greater it is perceived as an authority.

However, link-building is more sophisticated than simply totaling up in-bound links. Search engines weigh relevant links higher than non-relevant links. A relevant link is one which comes from a site related to your industry or area of expertise. For instance, my law firm fights any New York traffic ticket, such as a speeding ticket or reckless driving ticket. Valuable sites to place links to my own site would be car forum sites, law firm directories and driver safety blogs. In contrast, a link from a site focused on helping small business, such as nyreport.com, wouldn't be as valuable.

The next thing you should know about linking is that you want an actual word or phrase hyper-linking to your site rather than just your URL address. Examples of this can be found in the preceding paragraph. The reason you want the word or phrase hyper-linked rather than your web address is that you want to tell the search engines that your site is an authority for the term or phrase. Most users will use these words and phrases when searching for companies in your industry, and you want them to find your site when they do. Anyone who is searching your URL address is most likely looking for you specifically anyway and, in any event, you will likely be ranked high already for a search of your own URL.

A common mistake I see among website owners is engaging in link exchanges. A link exchange is when you place a link on your site in exchange for another site owner placing your link on his or her site. Assuming both sites are relevant to your industry or expertise, only the one with the higher ranking will give "link juice" to the other (while the higher ranking site will lose link juice). But why would someone give away their link juice? Anyone who knows how back-linking would not. Sites with equal ranking do not involve a link juice transfer and, therefore, are not helpful. By the way, you can measure a site's stature from 1 to 10 using the Google tool bar.

Another thing you need to know is that some links don't count at all. A link with a "no follow" code is worthless. You can determine if a link has been designated as "no follow" by clicking on "View" and then "Page Source."

Link building is an on-going but important SEO strategy. With patience, your site will see improved natural results when done properly.