Scott Fish

Search Engines view links as a vote of importance and authority.

History - Early search engines placed a focus on the content of a site, looking at factors such as keyword density and other on-page factors.

Today - Much of Google’s success in providing users with relevant search results stems from looking off of a site and at the links pointing to that site. In today’s competitive arena, in-bound links are more important than ever.

Future - Search engines are constantly evolving to provide the most relevant search results to users. In the future, factors such as community votes, most trusted sources, and micro-factors will make a difference in determining ranking of a site.

Determining the Value of a Link

The value of links are determined my many factors. Search Engine Optimization strategies can be employed to determine how valuable the links are and whether they are worth obtaining.

Major factors:

1. The volume of incoming links to a webpage.

2. The quality of the incoming links to a webpage.

3. The anchor text (link text) of the incoming link to your webpage.

Volume of Links

• Web sites can have millions of links pointing to them, Google.com has about 300 Million, or they can have just a few.
• The more links pointing to a web site, more authority it is given by the search engines.
• Prominent web sites are given more authority because they have been linked to many times by several different sources.
• Links to the internal pages are important.

Quality of Links

All links are not created equal.

• Sites like CNN.com are highly relevant and trusted, 1 link from CNN.com is worth more than 100s of links from smaller websites that just launched last month.
• Good neighborhoods vs. Bad neighborhoods.
• Generally, focus on quality over quantity.

Anchor Text

• Keyword research is important for determining the anchor text for keywords.
• Variations, such as plural vs. singular and inverse keywords are important.
• Brand vs. Keyword anchor text.