One of the great features of the web is its inter-connectivity – how may web pages link to many other web Navigating or ‘surfing’ as it was christened allows a free style of movement from one page, and one site to another via the hyperlinks in web pages.
Typically, links are used to provide context, a better explanation of and further information about the subject you are reading about on a web page.
Since most people use the web for research of some kind – whether it is research about a potential purchase, research for work, leisure or study – the web’s structure allows speedy gathering of information, and speedy, relatively easy transactions of all kinds.
With the modern web, the idea of inserting these ‘hyperlinks’ within your web pages, blog pages etc, be they from text or graphic elements, has always helped to maintain this structure.
The rise of and the increasing use of the Internet for commercial activities, and in many cases the ability of web pages to perform many functions from promotion through to handling the sale and payment of goods and services, coupled with the rise an now dominance of Google as a search engine of choice and a major referrer of visitors to your web pages have changed the way links are thought of and used.
Of all the visitors to your web pages for example, assuming that there are a significant number at present, I would guess that Google would be typically delivering at least 50% of them to you. If you are running PPC campaigns with Google, which is a paid-for advertising service, it is likely that this figure will be even higher. Assuming that you have a web stats, or web analytics package or system in place, it would also not be unusual to see other popular search engines only accounting for less than 5% each at most of the visitors delivered to your web pages.
It would probably be fair to say that everybody, and certainly most organisations and traders would like their web pages to appear at the top of Google’s search results for as many important and potentially lucrative key phrases as possible.
Therefore SEO or search optimisation of your web pages is often an exercise in making sure your pages fit within the guidelines of, and are as attractive possible to, and function as well as possible within Google’s systems.
The potential interest, enquiries, business and ultimately profits that could be gained from basically appearing anywhere as near as possible to the top of first page of Google search results have meant that we can all expect stiff competition when trying to get there. With so much at stake, and the kind of diffused, detached and distant feelings of responsibility that simply using YOUR computer could give you, it’s no wonder than there is a good deal of foul as well as fair means being used to reach these top spots.
It’s also the case that many people simply aren’t aware of, or don’t have time to make a study of where some of these boundaries lie.
Search engines on the other hand, such as Google, need people to continue using them on a regular basis, and in preference to other search engines.
Google has long known that in order to do this, they need to deliver their users which are essentially their customers before they become your customers, to the pages that best meet their search needs.
For this to happen, they need good, sophisticated search engine technology, that consistently delivers high quality, useful, relevant results, but is as easy as possible for users to operate. Google’s obviously worked very hard in this area.
What is an incoming link?
Ideally, it is a link from another page on the web, housed at another domain.
If you have the ability to check your incoming links (which I will go into in the next video in this series), you will see that the link architecture of your web pages i.e. the links between your own web pages (where it’s relevant to do so) can also be counted as incoming links.
An outgoing link is a hyperlink from one of your web pages, to another domain i.e. another page on the web, housed at a different domain to your own. It is commonplace for web pages to have for example a ‘links’ page that contains outgoing links.
So, where do incoming links fit into this, and why are they so important to your web pages?
With greater education among, resources and training available to webmasters / website owners, consider for a moment that it’s possible for two different web pages to optimised to more or less the same degree for more or less the same key phrases. Imagine also if you will that there are new pages all the time being developed, which may also be aligned toward the same key phrases.
One of Google’s main tasks as I said earlier was to deliver the search results that best fit the query. If several pages are equally relevant to a key phrase, how will Google choose which one should rank above another?
Google needs therefore to decide not just which page is most relevant, but which pages are also the most ‘important’ for specific key phrases.
Google’s PageRank – the kind of scoring system or poll – is one way that Google uses to decide and indicate which pages may be more ‘important’ than others. Google states that it uses 200 or so measurements when deciding how to categorise and rank a web page, but it would be fair to say that having a good number of high quality incoming links to a page is highly likely to increase its importance as well as its relevance, and in doing so, can make it rank more highly in the search engine results. PageRank is a score from 0 to 10 allocated to a page in relation to this.
The underlying basic assumption, is that is a someone links to your page, you page must somehow be important or interesting. This calculation system is named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, and hence PageRank is quite different to where pages rank in the search engine results. It is important to note that it is essentially the QUALITY of the incoming link that counts, not the quantity.
What makes a high quality incoming link?
When judging the quality of a link, search engines such as Google are interested in being able to establish good ‘CONTEXT’ for the link i.e. to a degree, how relevant is the incoming link to the subject matter of the page it is linking to?
Essentially there are 4 main factors:
1. The text on the page that the link comes from.
How relevant is the text content of that page to the text content of the page it is linking to? Is the subject matter related to the subject matter of the page it is linking to?
In deciding this, Google can help to ensure that it is ‘fairly’ ranking the importance of a page, thus helping to guard the integrity and quality of its search engine results, and at the same time is guarding against for example, paid-for links from irrelevant pages.
2. Does the anchor text – the blue hyperlink itself – contain a text phrase that is relevant to the page it is linking to? For example, by including the domain name as the actual link itself (provided it contains no relevant key phrases) of the words ‘click here’, these would be unlikely to have any relevance to the content of the page they are linking to. As such, they would devalue the link compared to a blue hyperlink that was itself made up of a relevant key phrase to the page it’s linking to.
3. Are there many other outgoing links from the page that links to yours (as an incoming link) and if so, are they relevant links? Google for instance would be doing a couple of things here. If the links on the other page were all unrelated in nature and subject matter – and it’s highly likely they’d be text links anyway e.g. from somebody’s dedicated links page, it’s highly unlikely that the text on the page would be relevant to the page its; linking to anyway.
Also, a feature of ‘dubious’ linking schemes, link farms and paid-for link schemes, is that they are often long pages with lots of different links coming from them. Google seems to value these paid-for, often irrelevant links much less – in fact they’re likely to violate the Google guidelines, and as such, might not do your site any favours. Pages with very few outgoing links on them, that are related and relevant in subject matter are much less likely to be dubious as regards the guidelines, and therefore can be valued higher.
4. What is the Google PageRank of the page that is supplying the link?
If the page that the link is coming from has itself got a good PageRank e.g. 3 or 4 out of 10, Google has already accepted the importance of this page, and therefore a link from it is likely to be beneficial.
It may also be important if this higher ranking page was deemed to be ‘important’ for keywords related to those found in the page it’s linking to.
Ultimately, and ideally, providing good, interesting, informative, original content on your pages should in itself attract natural links, and it is these kinds of natural links, and natural linking patterns that are likely to be particularly valued by Google.
To Sum up:
Good quality incoming links to your web pages can increase their Google PageRank, and improve their position in the search engine rankings for your important key phrases.
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