2 Comments Written by Robert on August 23, 2008 – 1:16 am

In a fraction of a second, Google’s search algorithm computes how many Web sites link to your Web site and the value of each individual link. Google automatically performs this process millions of times every day:

Google believes that calculating links and taking into consideration such things as what those links say, along with the quality of the Web sites they come from, is an effective method of determining a Web site’s authority. Google ranks sites based on how authoritative they are in their respective markets. Delivering relevant results and determining authority is the foundation of the Google search engine.

In short, if you have a lot of quality Web sites that link to your Web site, you are probably doing well in Google’s organic, or nonpaid, results. However, if you have just a few links, you are probably scouring resources to figure out what you can do to improve your search-engine ranking.

Evaluate Competition

The first step to effectively building links is to evaluate your competition. What works for your strongest competitors can also work for you. At this early stage of the link building process, your goal should be to build the foundation for an effective search-engine-optimization business plan. You should take the process of evaluating competition seriously and spend the requisite time necessary to rank your competition and take advantage of their success.

One of the most effective ways to find potential quality link partners is to mimic the efforts of your most successful competition. What works for your high-ranking competition can also work for you. Any Web page that links to a competitor of yours is a prime candidate to link to your Web page as well.

Link building

Because the number of quality incoming links plays such a large role in Google’s organic ranking algorithm, you should put together a list of Web pages that link to your top performing competitors. First, determine who your top competitors are. Focus on pages that target the same audience that you intend to target. Then, find out where all their links are coming from and attempt to acquire links from those sites to your own.

The simplest tools available to find your competition’s backlinks are the search engines themselves. Google and Yahoo provide a way to find all the links pointing to a particular Web page. You can use Google’s link query and Yahoo’s linkdomain query. These tools allow you to find what sites link to any other site. Yahoo seems to keep the most updated and comprehensive list of these links.

Also, Yahoo allows you to exclude a domain when searching for links. For example, you may want to find how many sites are linking to your own site, but you do not want to see your own internal links.

Yahoo also allows you to find links from other domains to any pages on your site. Keep in mind that not all links are created equally, so after generating this list of prospective linking partners, you should evaluate each one on an individual basis before spending a great deal of time trying to make the acquisition. The next task explains more about evaluating links. After narrowing down your list, you should contact the Web page owners directly to discover what the owner might require to obtain a link, as discussed in the task “Request One-Way Links.”

Using the link search query on a domain in Google shows you only a small sampling of the total number of incoming links recognized by Google; however, people familiar with the search-engine marketing industry speculate that these are the links that Google considers the most influential to your site’s rankings. There are some advanced competition evaluation tools available.

One such tool is called Link Harvester, which can be found at www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester. Link Harvester provides a detailed look into an individual site’s incoming links, breaking down the list into links that come from unique domains, from unique C-class IP addresses, and from .edu, .mil, or .gov sources.

Another good linking procedure is Payingpost.com, a blog advertising network.

Another extremely valuable tool is called Hub Finder, which can be found at www.linkhounds.com/hubfinder. Hub Finder searches Yahoo, Google, or both for a specific search term, returns a list of the top ranking sites, and then examines the sites’ incoming links to determine which links they share. Enter a search term you are interested in increasing your rankings for into the tool. If all or even just a few of the top ranking sites for that term share an incoming link from a particular page, make an effort to obtain a link from that page for your own site.

Evaluate Potential Linking Partners

Not all links are created equally, so you should evaluate each potential linking partner for quality. This can be accomplished by analyzing numerous link-quality factors. By focusing on quality links, the major search engines are more likely to recognize you as a quality contributor to your Web site’s subject matter.

You can determine what is considered a quality link by analyzing a number of factors. One of the most important factors to consider is the age of the domain you are trying to acquire a link from. Google tends to treat older domains that have been around for several years with more respect than domains registered recently. If you can acquire a link to your page from a domain that was registered in 1995, it is likely to have a greater effect on your organic rankings than a link from a domain that was registered last month.

You should also try to acquire as many links as possible from domains with .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. The search engines know that these educational and governmental establishments are much less likely to link to low-quality pages than a typical .com or .net domain. If you cannot find any .edu or .gov links to directly link to you, try to find pages that do have a large number of .edu or .gov links and prospect those site owners for a link.

Make sure that pages you are prospecting for links have unique and relevant content to your page’s subject matter. The search engines can determine easily whether or not content is duplicated from another source, and they diminish the impact of links obtained from sites that publish duplicate content. Also, try to focus on acquiring links from pages that already rank well for the keywords and terms that you are targeting. Those pages are obviously already considered authorities on those topics, and a link can pass some of that authority onto your own site.

You may want to consider examining other factors when analyzing potential linking partners. Make sure that sites you are trying to acquire links from have incoming links that are relevant to their own content. If so, that site is likely an authoritative and trusted resource for that subject matter. You should also take into consideration the number of and quality of outbound links from a particular site. An outbound link is a link from a page of one site to another site.

If you acquire a link from a site that is linking to hundreds of other unrelated sites, search engines are likely to discount the link. Also, you should acquire links from high traffic pages. Those sites will then have the potential to pass some of their traffic along to your own page. Visit www.alexa.com, click Traffic Rankings, and enter the domain name of the potential linking partner into the search box. The more traffic the site receives, the lower the Alexa number is. Aim for sites with Alexa rankings of less than 100,000.

Acquire Quality Links

You can save yourself a measurable amount of time by approaching the link-building process from the standpoint of building quality links versus building a high quantity of links. Too often, Web site owners believe that they need thousands of links to rank well in the search engines. That is simply not true, regardless of what vertical, or industry, your Web site is in. For optimal success, your approach should be dictated by quality over quantity.

Developing the skill set required to quickly evaluate potential link partners includes learning how to identify the age of a domain, the uniqueness of content, and the potential for incoming traffic. Evaluating potential link partners for quality and focusing on those quality links is a key part of the link-building process and provides an opportunity for you to focus on some of the important factors that search engines take into consideration when determining the quality of the Web sites that link to your Web site.

You can save yourself a tremendous amount of time and effort by focusing your energy on acquiring a few high-quality, authoritative links versus a large quantity of low-quality links that are not related to your Web site. You can easily build a huge quantity of links back to your page by either manually submitting or purchasing software that mass submits your Web page to thousands of online guest books, forums, blogs, directories, and other link sources.

Quality of backlinks

However, this type of activity is often detected as spam by search engines and therefore should be avoided. Search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of detecting the difference between natural, relevant links, and unnatural, irrelevant links such as those typically submitted by software. Just one or two high-quality links can provide the same if not greater search-engine optimization benefit than hundreds of low-quality links.

All the major search engines, particularly Google, embrace this approach to link building. Google uses a numerical system called PageRank, or PR, to express an opinion on the relative authority of a Web page. Google assigns every Web page on the Internet a PageRank value of 0 through 10 based on a calculation of the quantity and quality of backlinks. Typically, the higher the number and quality of backlinks, the higher the PageRank. When prospecting link partners, you can easily check the PageRank of their page and get a general feel for how important that link may appear in Google’s eyes. You can easily check a site’s PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar (available for download at toolbar. google.com) or by visiting www.pagerank.net (a Web site not owned by Google).

Many industry insiders believe that Google and other leading search engines such as Yahoo rank Web sites based on how “trusted” they are in their individual niches. In fact, Yahoo published a paper, located at www. vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF, that uses a technique called TrustRank for semiautomatically separating useful Web pages from spam. This score, known as a site’s TrustRank, is not made available to the public; however, you can assume that sites ranked highly by Google and Yahoo’s algorithm for competitive keywords likely possess a high trust score.

Obtaining links from highly trusted sites can have a greater effect on your search-engine rankings than obtaining links from sites with high PageRank alone. You can take advantage of this knowledge by focusing your link-building efforts on sites that appear to meet Google’s Trust Rank criteria.

Sites that meet such criteria have been in existence for a long period of time, contain a substantial amount of unique content, possess a large number of quality incoming links, and rank highly for many keywords related to their niche. Aaron Wall from SEObook.com offers a fantastic free Firefox extension called SEO for Firefox at tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html. After you install this plug-in, your Google and Yahoo search results will contain information about each result’s PageRank, age, incoming links, and more.

This tool gathers information for you about each page that would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. According to SEO experts, including Aaron Wall, TrustRank algorithms appear to focus on tendencies and linking patterns of trusted versus non trusted Web pages. For example, Aaron suggests that trusted Web pages rarely link to poor, non trusted Web pages, while non trusted Web pages often link to trusted Web pages in an attempt to convince search-engine algorithms that the non trusted page is more important than it actually is. Aaron also suggests that TrustRank is attenuated or weakened as it passes from Web site to Web site.

Using Effective Anchor Text

Once you have identified potential link partners, you want to determine the anchor text to use for each link. This part of the Google algorithm focuses not on how many links you have pointing back to your Web site, but on what those links say. Approaching the rest of the link-building process with a list of keywords that you want to use as anchor text is essential to your link-building success. You should use a variety of anchor text throughout your link building to ensure that the search engines can determine the overall theme of your site.

Choosing appropriate anchor text for both your incoming and outgoing links can play a large role in increasing your search-engine rankings for the terms and keywords your site is targeting. Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a World Wide Web hyperlink. You often see links with the clickable text “Click here.” In this case, the anchor text of the link is “Click here.” You must use the context around that link to determine the topic of the page you are about to visit. A more effective use of anchor text is to describe the content of the page being linked to directly in the anchor text. For example, a link to a page about search-engine optimization could have the anchor text “search-engine optimization,” “SEO,” or something else related to search-engine optimization.

Anchor text

When building links to your Web page, you should always attempt to acquire links with highly descriptive anchor text. Search engines use anchor text to determine the theme of the page being linked to, and anchor text is an important factor in search engines’ ranking algorithms. Throughout your link-building efforts, you usually have the opportunity to specify what anchor text you want attached to your link.

You want the anchor text of your incoming links to directly relate to the keywords and terms for which you want to increase your search engine rankings. Do not overuse a specific variation of anchor text. The search engines rank you more highly for more terms if you include some variety in your anchor text selection. Do your fellow Webmasters a favor and always link to other Web sites with relevant anchor text. This helps their search-engine optimization efforts as well as your own.

If you already have incoming links to your Web site, you may want to analyze and potentially alter the anchor text of these links. Jim Boykin from WeBuildPages.com offers a backlink and anchor text analysis tool located at www.webuildpages.com/neat-o. Entering your Web site URL into this tool gives you a list of pages that link to your site as well as the anchor text that is attached to each link. Although the tool is not 100 percent accurate, you can get a substantial list of incoming links and their anchor text.

If you find many incoming links to your site that do not have descriptive anchor text, contact the owners of those sites and politely ask them if they would consider changing the anchor text to something more relevant to the content of your site. Make a suggestion about what the anchor text of the link should be. Many Webmasters agree to this request because a link with descriptive anchor text provides a better experience for their own visitors as well as allowing them the opportunity to fit a few more keywords into their own page.

This is the post 1 of 3. All  3 are related to backlinks and google. Part 2 can be found here and part 3 - here.

Enjoy!