Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ and discover how Google is the key for attracting visitors to your website…
Each link that another website has to your site can be regarded as a vote, but not all votes are equal. Links from pages that Google already regards as important are worth more.
As outlined, this links-as-votes system was a key driver in Google’s emergence as the leader in the search engine market, and as one of the most influential and successful businesses on the planet in the past decade.
Want to know who’s linking to your website? A quick and simple way to find out which other websites currently link to you is to use the “link:” command at Yahoo.com in conjunction with the site’s domain name in a Yahoo search. Try this exercise for your own site, and also try it for the websites already created by any web designer you are considering using. If the sites they have built for their clients have only a few incoming links, it is likely the site they build for you will not perform well in the search engines.
But what determines a quality link? Firstly, no incoming link can do you any harm, but some will do you more good than others. Some characteristics of a valuable link are:
1. From a page with a theme that’s related to that of the page being linked to.
2. From a page that itself has a high quality and quantity of incoming links.
3. From a trusted domain – the longer it has been in the search engine index the better.
4. Non-commercial top level domains like .gov, .edu, .ac, .govt etc, tend also to be very valuable.
5. From a page with few other links on it (ie the value of the link to you is diluted by any other links on the page).
6. Non-reciprocal. If a site links to you and you have no link back to them, then Google will regard this more favourably.
7. A link that uses the keyword phrase that the page being linked to is targeting. For example if your page is optimised for: “Blue widgets, Eastville” then this is what the clickable link text should say. The search engine regards this external verification of the topic of a page very highly.
8. Doesn’t use the “no follow” attribute. While most links pass on a “vote” to the destination web page, a piece of code can be inserted into the link to prevent this. This is called the no follow attribute. Many blogs and popular sites, like Wikipedia, use the no follow attribute to prevent them being inundated with people posting rubbish content simply to get a link back to their site.
There are a number of easy ways that you can increase the amount of incoming links to your website.
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
