These days most search engine build their indexes by “crawling” sites. As we mentioned before, this is done primarily by following links from page to page, and from site to site.
As search engines follow links, they try to figure out the relevance of the sites they are indexing. Even though we’d all like to think of the ourselves as honest people, search engines have figured out that what we say our site is about might not be what it really is about. While your content still has a lot of value in determining your search engine position, Google and others have learned that a better way to figure out relevance is to see who’s linking to you.
Given this, it’s obvious that links weigh heavily in most search engine algorithms. As you develop your search engine optimization strategy, it is important to spend time focusing on the links that are on your site and the links other people have pointing to you. When possible, you want to adjust these links for maximum benefit. The following are some aspects of your links you’ll want to consider.
Anchor text of the link
Search engines pay very close attention to the actual words better use to when linking to another site. For example, consider the following links to Intentionally’s site:
Search engines would look at these three and consider the second the most valuable. It not only provides the name of the firm but describes the link as well, giving the search engine some context. The worst would be the third example, which shows no additional information at all.
When you have control of link text, make sure your text is relevant to the keywords you’re looking for.
Links going to other sites
Search engines don’t just consider links to you - they also will consider links you put on your site that go elsewhere. For example, if you were looking to position yourself for “chicago usability consulting” but your pages are mostly linking to sites that have nothing to do with usability your site could be treated as irrelevant for that term.
Text surrounding your links (i.e. the links in context)
As search engines have become more savvy, they’ve learned how to examine the content around the link. They operate under the assumption that paragraphs generally are describing an single idea or thought, and as such take the entire paragraph into consideration.
The location of links relative to the overall site heirarchy
We mentioned this previously, but links that are buried deep in your site carry less weight than links that are directly accessible from the homepage or secondary pages. Site maps can help in this regard, but make a conscious effort to have your most important content easily accessible from the homepage.
The amount of links on individual pages
A trick that was commonly used in the past was to create a site that was nothing but keyword stuffed links. Search engines picked up on this and started penalizing sites that employed this practice. Today, the general rule is that as the number of links on a particular page increase, the relative strength for each individual link go down. It’s smart to create focused pages about single topics and have the majority of your links be about those specific topics vs. lots of general links.
Prominence of a link in your site’s code
Generally speaking, links placed higher on the page have more weight than links down on the bottom. This is based on the premise that the most valuable content is usually “above the fold” and prominently placed, and also a defense against sites that hide a bunch of links on the bottom of their pages to influence search engine rankings.
Again, there are other issues to consider, but the above should be taken into consideration when crafting your content and overall site strategy.