Links – a Great Way to Improve Your SEO Page Rank
In my last blog, I went into the importance of good keyword selection in order to help get your site found by Google and other search engines. That first step is extremely important but it is only part of the equation. The next step is getting your site read and linked to by influential people who have material relevant to yours.
If you think about the internet for a minute you will understand when I say it is totally interwoven. Log on to your computer, go online, start searching for information, and you will see what I mean. Type in a search phrase and then look at the first page that comes up in the search engine. Everything you see has a link to click on if you want to get information. And the only way to get any further is by clicking on another link and so on.
As I mentioned in a previous post about understanding Google, periodically Google sends out "spiders" to read material, index it and put that information on servers all over the world. When an internet user goes online to do a search, Google already has relevant material indexed (think of the index in the back of a textbook) which is be pulled up very quickly. Previous to that search Google has already determined the importance of that material – the first way by keywords and the second way is by who is actually linked to that page – also known as backlinks.
So if people are doing SEO properly, they are linking to the pages that they like and, in return, they are doing things to get other sites to link back to their sites. These backlinks help determine how important Google determines the site to be. There are ways to get backlinks when you are first starting – I will address that subject in another post,
There are good backlinks and there are bad backlinks. That is determined by the reputation of the site that is linking to your page and also how relevant that material is to yours. Links coming from very reputable sites that are relevant to your subject are considered to be great ones that will give you the best ratings. Bad backlinks, on the other hand, should be avoided as much as possible as they definitely won’t help you with the search engines. An example of a bad backlink could be one coming from a spam site.
Another thing you may have heard about are the terms inbound links versus outbound links. Simply put, inbound links are the ones coming to your site from the other pages – outbound are the ones that are going from your site to the other sites.
Another good practice to consider is using internal links. Internal links actually connect pages of your site together. If you look at the first and second paragraphs of this blog, you may understand a little more of what I mean as I have actually placed an internal link in each of those two paragraphs. If you click on those, you will be taken to relevant pages of this site for reference. Make certain you are using internal links in a way that makes sense. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time.
I greatly appreciate any comments may that can enhance this material to the reader.
