Series 4 Article 40
Keywords aren’t the only important factor search engines take into account when generating your site’s ranking. Just because a site uses keywords well doesn’t mean it’s one of the best resources on the Web. To determine the quality of a Web page, most automated search engines use link analysis.
When doing link analysis, search engines will look to see how many other Web pages link to your website.
If other websites are linking to your website, it must contain great information, right? Well, that’s what search engines are assuming.
Now, it can’t be just any ol’ website linking to yours. If the site linking to your site are ranked high in Google’s system, they boost your page’s rank more than lesser-ranked pages.
So, how do you get sites to link to your page? That can be a time consuming and tricky task, but will be well worth your time once the links are in place. Making sure your page is a destination people want to link to is the first and most important step. The second step is finding the sites to which you most want to align yourself.
You may also want to offer link exchanges with other sites that cover material related to your content. Simply email the company and ask that your request be forwarded to their webmaster for consideration.
You don’t want to trade links with just anyone because many search engines look to see how relevant the links to and from your page are to the information within your page. Too many irrelevant links and the search engine will think you’re trying to cheat the system.