The most important aspect of search engine optimization is link building. Without link building, a website simply will not rank well within the search engines.

Text links are simply a clickable link that directs the surfer to your website. While browsing a web page, you will see different sets of words which are many times highlighted in blue. These are text links.

When search engine spiders crawl websites, they use these text links to find other websites, understand what the other website/web page is about, and whether the destination site is related to its content.  They are like road signs which the robots follow in order to find and index pages on the internet. The more links pointing to a site, the more important it appears to the search engines. Aside from that, if the link includes anchor text (a keyword or keywords) that is related to your website, then the page gains higher authority for the keyword and therefore will rank better within the natural search engine results for the keyword.

“Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.”  This is a statement quoted from the Google Webmaster Guidelines, under the Design and Content section.  This is the very reason why link building is important “one way links help spiders find and crawl a website. They help them index your site properly so that they show up in search results which are related to the keywords you are targeting for your site. Text links help spiders understand your site. It is like a word of mouth, a recommendation for a good site.”  Another good way to look at a backlink is as a “vote”  The more “votes” your website has, the better it is going to rank.

Another benefit of building text links is that your website will generally increase its Google Page Rank over time.  Approximately every three to four months, Google goes out and analyzes the backlinks of each website on the entire internet.  Based on a very complex algorithm, it will assign a number to each website.  This number can range from 0 to 10 with ten being the highest.  Typically, the higher the page rank of a website, the better it is going to rank within the natural search engine results.

Aside from increased page rank and search engine rankings, when you buy text links you can also help increase visits to your site. This is called link traffic. When an internet user sees an article or a blog post which interests them and this content has anchor text which is related to your niche, then you increase the chance of them visiting your site, especially when they are looking for more information.

If you are engaged in link building, then you’ve probably heard about link exchanges. Although reciprocal links can help increase your link popularity, these types of links are not as valuable as one-way links. The most effective links are one-way links that are placed on a page that has a higher page ranking and is related to your site.  The higher the page rank of a website’s backlinks, the better the chances are that its own page rank will increase. As discussed above, there are many advantages to this.

When building backlinks make sure that the domain you are getting the links  from are older than six months, have a high page rank,  are “clean” websites, and have a lot of traffic themselves.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 12:35 am and is filed under Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.