Incoming Links: How to Win the SEO Popularity Contest
Let’s go over the foundation of successful search engine optimization. For all the work you can do on your own web site to make it search engine friendly, most of what you need to do takes place off of your web site.
The best way to get your web site to rise to the top of the search engines is to get the most, and best, incoming links. “Incoming links” simply means that some other web site has created a link on one of their pages that, when people click on that link, takes them to your web site.
There are many reasons people will link to your web site. Maybe you have good information on your web site that they are referencing, or you have something entertaining or interesting worth sharing. We’ll talk more in this section about how to get more incoming links, but the first thing to understand is how the linking system works and why not all links are created equal. Here’s how it works:
Popularity Contest
Incoming links is one of the top ways that search engines decide how high your page will rank. If there are 100 web sites linking to your web site, you will probably come up higher in a search engine than a competitor who only has 20 web sites linking to them.
Each time someone links to your web site, they are effectively “voting” for you. This is a pretty good way for search engines to determine which sites are the most popular. It makes good sense that the more people are linking to your web site, the better your site is at whatever you do.
Good Incoming Links
Having said that, not all links are created equal. Here are some guidelines for the kind of links you want to get. Let’s say you want to rank high for “real estate investing” (i.e. if someone typed “real estate investing” into Google, Yahoo, etc… you want your site to show up near the top of the list of sites that people see).
Web Site Quality
If a web site about “model airplanes” links to your “real estate” web site, that link won’t count as highly as a web site about real estate would. So it’s not just the sheer number of links coming to your site, but what kind of sites those links are coming from. A link coming from another real estate web site is considered “higher quality”.
Web Site Rank
Search engines not only look at the topic of the web site that is linking to you, but they look at how popular that web site is as well.
If your friend Bubba links to you from his one-page real estate web site that nobody knows exists, that incoming link won’t count for much. But if www.real-estate-online.com links to you (this site is currently the top site that shows up in Google when I type in “real estate investing”) that’s a HUGE vote in your favor.
So how do you get these quality sites to link to you? This is a completely separate topic worthy of it’s own tutorial, and I cover it in detail in my advanced tutorials.
The Link Itself
Generally speaking, it’s good if the link on the other site has the words “real estate investing” in the link. For example, if the link says:
“Visit Jarom’s Real Estate Investing Web Site”
that’s better than it reading:
“Click Here to go to Jarom’s Real Estate Investing Web Site”
Notice how the words “real estate investing” are inside the first link, where the second link just says “click here”. It’s not a huge deal, but if you have the option then the first link is better than the second because it’s more descriptive.
How To NOT Get Incoming Links
There are a few things that I will mention here that are outdated methods you don’t want to try.
Link Swap (aka. reciprocal links)
Swapping links (i.e. agreeing with another site owner that if they link to your site then you’ll link to their’s) is still helpful for search engine ranking, but not as much as it use to be. Search engines can see that your sites are linked to each other and will probably not count those votes as highly as if just one site was linking to another.
Some site owners get a bit more complicated and try to daisy-chain their sites together by linking site 1 to site 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, and 4 to 1. That works better, but search engines eventually figure it out and it usually takes a lot of coordination. There are easier ways.
Link Farms
There aren’t too many places pitching “link farms” anymore, but I’ll take a moment to warn you against them anyways.
When search engines first started the “link voting system” a while back, some people got smart and created web sites full of nothing but links. You could pay some money and get your site included on all these “link farm” web sites, and suddenly you’d have a ton of sites linking to your site and your search engine ranking would skyrocket.
Search engines caught on to this very quickly and started “black listing” these link farm sites. Now a link from these sites will actually count against you.
There are more “black hat” (against search engine rules) techniques floating around out there that will get you in trouble with search engines. If you aren’t sure if something is a good idea, become a member of my site and get access to the conference call. I can tell you for sure if some strategy someone is promoting is going to help or harm your site.
Other popular Search Engine tutorials:
- How to break a search engine’s heart
- Optimize Your Site for the Right Keywords
- Thwarting the Search Engines