Search Engines and Links

You may already know that search engines put significant weight on the links that point to your various website pages. They look at a few things in evaluating those links:

• Quantity: Generally speaking, the more links you have, the more authority search engines will see your site as having, given you more weight in the search engines.
• Quality: But in addition to quantity, quality is crucial. Search engine bots are smart little critters and they know when people try to game the system for links (See the next section on “What Not To Do with Link Building” for more info). To be an authority site, the more links you have from other authority sites, the better.
• Text Matters: Search engines look at the text that appears in the links that come to your website. For example if links to your site say best darned website in the world, search engines will tend to believe it.

Of course, this linking needs to be natural. If every link pointing to your site says best darned website in the world, this will look suspect.

But word of caution: Not all links, even if they are quality, count toward your search engine rankings. For example, search engines know that people comment on blogs and forums for the purpose of building links, so they may not give these much weight – but that shouldn’t keep you from using these methods.

In addition, some authority sites use a “no follow” link which means that search engines won’t count the links at all…but they can still drive traffic, build your reputation and more.

Link building serves many purposes, gets your website seen and drive traffic…plus the most important of all…links breed links, so go build them!

Next: What Not to Do with Link Building
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