Introduction to Link Optimization

The links to your website reflect a lot of information back onto your site. This greatly affects your website ranking. Link optimization is important to have as a part of your seo plan. This post will discuss the seven ways links to your website affect your search engine results ranking, as well as the importance of link optimization.

Anchor text

Anchor text is important for on page and off page optimization. It is very potent information for search engines. A website without crawlable information for the search engine to find will look for the anchor text leading to your site. Backlinks are important for getting a website higher up on search results. However it’s important to note where these come from. Backlink indexers are a great way to see where your site is being linked. Allowing you to determine how it reflects back onto the site.

Authority

Site authority is based first on topical relevance, and next on how respected the source is. Depending upon the authority of the site, having a link placed there could positively or negatively affect your search engine ranking.  A site with high authority linking to your site would increase the credibility of your site. This signals to the search engine that your site is reputable and deserving of a higher placement on the search results. It would take much website search engine marketing to get onto a high authority site without being respectable already.

Trust

How easily spammers are able to infiltrate a site determines how trustworthy the site is. A heavily spammed site linking to your site can damage your search engine ranking. However, a link from a trusted website will bring your site higher on the results page. Evaluating the trust of the website involves looking into sites that link to the site. If other trusted websites link to a site that in turn links to your site, then your site is more likely to be considered trustworthy.

Relevance

It’s important to be on sites that discuss relevant information. Websites that discuss the same topic as your site and link to your site are worth more than links from random sites. Sites that are topically relevant reinforces to the search engine what your site is about and makes it easier for the search engine to classify your site as being within a specific genre.

Temporal factors

Search engines keep track of when links pop up to your website. They look at whether they all appeared simultaneously or over a period of time. Search engines also notice if links to your site disappear, how quickly they appeared (or disappeared), and the authority of the site that they appear on. For the sake of website optimisation  and getting linked from sites, it’s important to have links to your site that are timely and steady. Search engines look out for sites that buy links and it definitely leads to a negative effect on the search engine results page.

Context and Relevance

The best search engine algorithm will compare the context and relevance of the links to your site among links. Search engines determine whether all the links on the linking site are of high authority and relevant to your site. Depending on the authority and trustworthiness  of the other links on the site, it could mean a higher or lower ranking on the search engine results page. The search engine also looks at the placement of the link on the site. Links in the body of the content are typically better than those placed to the side or bottom. Being a part of another site’s seo content, as a high authority website, signals to search engines that your website is trustworthy. Additionally, this will increase your placement on the results page.

Source diversity

As any seo guide would say,  a diversity of domains increases your spot on the search engine results page. In contrast, it is typically detrimental to have all of the links to your site from the same owner. Search engines like real, organic, trustworthy links from multiple domains.

What is the take away?

Link optimization should be an important part of your SEO strategy. Closely  monitoring your links will help optimize your search ranking. Search engine ranking tools are a good way to monitor how your website is competing against other sites. They can also help you move forward with an seo plan. The old adage,  “that you’re only as good as the company you keep,” rings true for websites as well.