Why Links Are so important?

Probably the word that associates best with Web is “links”. That is what hypertext is all about – you link to pages you like and get linked by pages that like your blog. Actually, the Web is woven out of interconnected pages and spiders follow the links, when indexing the Web. An example of this is the Google spiders crawling the webpages across the Web. If not many sites or blogs link to you, then it might take ages for search engines to find your blog and even if they find you, it is unlikely that you will have high rankings because the quality and the quantity of links is part of the algorithms of search engines for calculating relevancy and this will effect your blog’s search engine results position SERP.

Inbound and Outbound Links

Put in layman’s terms, there are really two types of links that are important for SEO – inbound and outbound links. Outbound links are links that start from your blog and lead to another one, while inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external site or blog to yours, e.g. if anydomain.com links to mydomain.com, the link from anydomain.com is an inbound link for mydomain.com.

Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your blog among the Web audience. It is necessary to say that not all backlinks are equal. There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places – preferably from blogs or sites with a similar theme or content. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don’t worry – buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives. For instance, some of the good places where you can get quality backlinks are reputable Web directories like Open Directory Project or Yahoo Directory.

First, look for suitable sites to backlink to you. After you identify potential backlinks, you can contact the blogger or site owner and start negotiating terms. Sometimes you can agree to a barter deal – i.e. a link exchange – they will put on their blog some links to your blog and you will put on your blog some links to their blog; but have in mind that this could be a bad, risky deal and you should always try to avoid it.

Internal links (i.e. links from one page to another page on the same site) are also important but not as much as backlinks. In this connection it is necessary to say, that using images for links might be prettier but it is an SEO killer. Instead of having buttons for links, use simple text links. Since search engines spider the text on a page, they can’t see all the ‘pretty’ graphics, like gradient buttons or flash animations, so when possible, either avoid using them, or provide a meaningful textual description using CSS methods.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the most important item in a backlink. While it does matter where a link comes from (i.e. a reputable place or a link farm), what matters more is the actual text the link starts from. Put simply, anchor text is the word(s) that you click on to open the hyperlink – e.g. if we have the best search engine, than “the best search engine” is the anchor text for the hyperlink to www. google.com. You see that you might have a backlink from a valuable site but if the anchor text is something like “an example of a complete failure”, you will hardly be happy with it.

When you check your backlinks, always check what their anchor text is and if there is a keyword in it. It is a great SEO boost to have a lot of backlinks from quality sites and the anchor text to include our keywords.  Besides the anchor text itself, the text around it is also important.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

Similar to keyword stuffing, purchasing links in bulk is a practice to be avoided. It gets suspicious if you bartered 1000 links with another site in a day or two. What is more, search engines keep track of link farms (sites that sell links in bulk) and since bought links are a way to manipulate search results, this practice gets punished by search engines. So avoid dealing with link farms because it can cause more harm than do good. Also, outbound links from your site to known Web spammers or “black hat” websites are also to be strongly avoided.

As mentioned, link exchange is not a clean deal. Even if it boosts your ranking, it can have many other negative aspects in the long run. First, you do not know if the other party will keep their promise – i.e. they might remove some of the links to you. Second, they might change the context the link appears into. Third, it is really suspicious if you seem to be “married” to another site or blog and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction.

When links are concerned, one aspect to have in mind is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case by case basis. If you have a site that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.