Phil Frost on Internet Marketing

In the world of search engine optimization, hyperlinks are king.  Once your website is designed properly, then the next step is to get links to improve your search rankings.  So how do you get links to your website?  Before you start a link building campaign you need to understand how links actually affect your search rankings.

The three core concepts I’ll discuss are:

1. Popularity
2. Reputation
3. Link Anatomy

Popularity

Each link to your website is essentially a vote from another website.  Naturally, the more votes you have the better and the total number of links to your webpage is a measure of that page’s “online popularity”.  If all else is equal, then a more popular page will rank higher in search results. 

Popularity is important, but your “online reputation” is what determines whether or not search engines consider your webpage relevant for particular search phrases, or keywords.  So how do search engines determine reputation?

Reputation

Your online reputation is determined by how people are linking to your webpages.  Every link has a URL (ie http://www.pcfrost.com) and anchor text.  Anchor text is what the user reads and clicks on.  For example, “Click Here to Read More” is the anchor text on many blog summaries.

If other sites are linking to your webpage using the anchor text, “Tequila Expert” and your page is about tequila, then your page’s reputation will be “tequila expert”.  As I said earlier, I’m assuming your website is already optimized and you have proper titles and descriptions.

Since your webpage reputation is “tequila expert” and other websites are linking to you (ie giving you votes), then search engines will want to display your page in the search results for keywords related to “tequila expert”.  The more popular and more relevant webpages will show up higher in the results.

Link Anatomy

The next thing to understand is that all links to your webpage are not created equally.  There are three main factors that determine a link’s value to your website, or more specifically to the page the link is pointing to.

1. Anchor text
2. Authority of the external webpage
3. Number of links on the external webpage

Anchor Text

I discussed the importance of anchor text in the context of reputation above.  Anchor text defines your reputation and therefore it’s critical that your links use keyword-rich anchor text.  Once you identify the keywords, or search phrases, that you want to rank for in the search engines, then you want to get links to your website using those keywords in the anchor text.

Authority of the External Webpage

Many people are already familiar with the idea of Google Page Rank (PR).  Google assigns every page a rank between 0 –10 (10 being the best) and this is considered the page’s online authority. 

A link from a PR 5 webpage has more value than a link from a PR 1 webpage.  This concept of link value is commonly referred to as “link juice”.  Every page has a limited amount of link juice defined by it’s page rank.  Again, the PR 5 page has more link juice than the PR 1 page. 

Number of Links on the External Webpage

Since every page has a limited amount of link juice, then we have to know how many other links are on the page that is linking to your page.  If there are 100 external links on the page linking to your page, then the value of the link to your page is diluted.  If you're the only link on the page, then you are getting 100% of the link juice from that page.

Seems simple enough right?

Well, there is one more important factor that is a bit technical.  There is an attribute on hyperlinks called a “no follow”.  For example, if you understand HTML then you know that a link is created using the following syntax: <a href=”URL”>anchor text</a>.  A no follow link will look like this: <a href=”URL” rel=”no follow”>anchor text</a>. 

The no follow attribute is a way to tell search engines you do not want to pass your link juice to the URL you are linking to.  So for the example above where the page had 100 external links you need to check to see if any are no follow links.  If all 100 links on that page are no follows, then the link to your page is receiving all of the link juice as if it was the only link.

OK, that’s a basic overview of how links affect your search rankings.  Armed with this knowledge you're now ready to create your link building campaigns around the keywords you want to rank for.  Good luck!