Keeping Up With Growth — How to Shine Using SEO (Part 2 of 3)

Mar 16

MikeSEO link building, SEO No Comments

As promised, we’re back again for Part 2 of our special on link building, the most effective tactic for SEO.  In case you missed our post yesterday, feel free to check out Part 1.

When search engines originated in the mid 90’s, simply incorporating keywords into your website’s page elements was enough to have it rank well.  Spammers quickly understood that they could stuff hundreds of keywords in a page’s code, including keywords that were not relevant to the content, to have it rank well and generate a rush of search engine traffic.  To combat spam, search engines needed another signal that would indicate whether they could trust a page enough to rank it well.  The solution was to use elements outside the control of a webmaster, so they could not be abused.  That solution turned out to be links — specifically, the quantity, quality, and relevance of links pointing to a page.

• Quantity — Think of Links as “Votes”:  Search engines use links as votes of confidence for what they are pointing to.  If a page has two links pointing to it from two unique websites, it can be viewed as two votes for that page.  If another page about the same content has one link pointing to it, the search engine will trust the page with two inbound links more, and will rank it higher in natural search results.
• Quality — All Links/Votes are NOT Equal: All inbound links are not created equal.  A link from a website that itself has a high number of quality links pointing to it carries more weight than a link from a page that is not well linked to.  For example, if we continue the “votes” analogy for a political candidate, an endorsement from The Washington Post carries more weight than an endorsement from a neighborhood newsletter.
• Relevance — Relevant Links are Better: Links from relevant websites are weighed more heavily than links from irrelevant sites.  For example, if a NYC restaurant’s website wants to build links in order to rank better for keywords related to [New York City Restaurants], it should seek links from food blogs, restaurant review websites, and New York travel guide sites, as opposed to a website about the skiing in Denver, which is irrelevant.

Stay tuned for the last part of this three part series, to publish tomorrow, when we discuss link building tactics.