A look at links
Posted by Administrator (boyd) on Jan 23 2009
Website design and development blog >> Search Engine Optimisation

An incoming link is a hyper-link on someone else's website that links to your website. There are two reasons that these links are important.

1. They generate traffic to your website. These links are like little ads waiting for someone to click them so they can deliver a potential customer to your site.
2. They help Google to understand what you website is about, and improve your rankings. 

When it comes to assessing the "quality" of an incoming link, you really only need to consider the humans. Don't worry too much about pleasing Google and other search engines because google is constantly trying to align it's system with human needs. Let me explain:

The first thing to note about the link are the words used in the link (Anchor text). If you have a website about "Internet Marketing", then the link should use the words "Internet Marketing". Variations on this are OK, as long as a human visitor will understand what they should expect if they click the link. (The link above lands on a page with the correct topic for the anchor text)

The next is the immediate text surrounding the link. Using the example above, the ideal position for this link would be in a paragraph of text that is all about internet marketing. Just like a human reader, google will examine the text and find associated keywords. If Google see a paragraph with the keywords "SEO", "backlink", "optimisation" and "traffic", then it probably already knows that the paragraph is about internet marketing.

The third factor to consider is the over all topic of the page that the link is sitting on. Ideally the page title would contain the same words as your link (although that is probably quite unlikely). The headings, other paragraphs and other links on the page should relate to your topic.

And finally, what is the overall topic of the website?

In summary, when you go to the trouble of finding incoming links for your website follow these guidelines. They are not hard and fast rules, but do try to keep them in mind.

1. Use keywords in anchor text
2. Try to get the link on a page that is relevant to your keywords and landing page
3. Make sure that the website is relevant to your website.

If I had the choice between 100 links from websites that have nothing to do with website design or internet marketing, and one link from a great site on internet marketing, I would always take the one link. Focus your efforts on quality, not quantity.

Here is a great tool for checking the backlinks in your existing website

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