You Link To My Site & I’ll Link To Yours…

Search engine optimization relies heavily on the concept of links. After all, the modern mental picture we have of the World Wide Web is of a mass of interconnected pages, connected to other pages like neurons in our brains. Without links, there would be no web; only a loose connection of unrelated documents, and navigation around the web would be impossible.

The web, tangled as it is, is therefore a world based on back scratching. The hyperlink was one of the first tags to be invented when HTML was first developed, and it has changed little since then (see http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/ for more information). Hyperlinks simply link one piece of text to another by allowing the user to click on the appropriate text (or image or almost anything else these days).

Where Am I?

It didn’t take too long for the web to become a big place, with people adding new pages at a prodigious rate. But then came the problem that folks wanted an easy way to find their way around, a map of sorts, to let them find specific information they were looking for. At the time, it was like being in a library with no librarian and no index of the bookshelves.

Enter the mighty search engine. The search engines began to catalogue the web by crawling from page to page, following any links they found, to move on to new pages. A primitive index was born and then it was enhanced to rank the entries for given keywords by relevance.

One of the key indicators of a page’s relative importance is the number of links that point to it from other pages, based on the premise that no one is likely to link from their page to another if they believe it’s irrelevant to what they’re saying. It would be like me adding a link from here to information on the genetics of giraffes – Interesting, perhaps, but hardly relevant to the subject of SEO.

So, the more incoming links a page has, the more important it must be. This is why having other pages link to your web site is a great way to increase your ranking in the search engines.

Google and the other search engines then decided to measure the number of links to a site with the actual text contained in those links to determine the relative value of each link.

For example, if you’re a portrait photographer with 100 links to your site, then the text for those links might say, “click here”, “photographer” or “portrait photographer”. The search engine index will count how many times each keyword is used in links to your site, so that when someone searches on “portrait photographer”, you will be listed in accordance to how many of the links to your site have those keywords in them.

Conclusion:

The obvious conclusion is it makes sense to ensure that all the links to your site have the same text in them, and to make them as specific as possible. If you’re a portrait photographer in Chicago, then request other webmasters to link to your site with “Chicago Portrait Photographer” as the link text instead of a simple “click here”. The search engines will then associate those keywords with your site.

If you want to see this in action, go to Google and search for the phrase “click here”. The first one in the search results is get.Adobe.Com, yet I don’t think you will find the words “click here” on their pages. The reason is that there are literally millions of web pages out there with the words “click here” pointing to get.Adobe.Com in order to download the Acrobat reader program and other software. The search engines have therefore associated the words “click here” with Adobe.

So, the next time you exchange links with another web site, remember that having meaningful and relevant text in the links that point to your site is a major way to help increase your search engine ranking.

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