Link popularity and link quality can be viewed as the yin and yang of offpage search engine optimization. While not necessary opposing factors, they are absolutely complementary. A paradigm shift is underway in how search engines view link popularity. While quantity of inbound links is still important, it's more than just a numbers game. Read on to learn more about offpage SEO factors and why your website promotion efforts must be highly targeted.
Offpage search engine optimization refers to factors that are not on your web site that impact your search engine ranking and the amount of traffic you receive. Believe it or not, offpage optimization ultimately decides whether you appear on page one in the search engines or on page one hundred. Offpage SEO factors include factors such as which sites link to you, the number of sites that link to you, the significance of the web sites that link to you and the anchor text of the link pointing to your web site. Of these offpage factors, the two most significant are link popularity and link quality. Focus your energy on these two factors for the most efficient and effective results.
Link Popularity
Simply stated, link popularity is the number of links that point to your web site. Search engines count each link as a vote for your site. Some votes are considered more important than others, but we will come back to that in a moment. You can have the best site on the internet with hundreds of pages of unique content, but if you have limited link popularity nobody will find your website. Bottom line, to overhaul your rankings in the search engines you need to improve the number of links pointing to your website. Like a sniper, use a very targeted and focused approach. To do this right, you should focus on building links from authority web sites that are related to your content - slowly. You do this by link exchange programs, buying one-way text links, through article marketing or by posting your link in blogs, newsletters or forums. Just be careful and use each of these techniques sparingly and intelligently. Search engines are very sophisticated and frown on abusive attempts to inflate link popularity. Inbound links appearing too fast - especially from unrelated websites - can drop your ranking or get you banned completely.
Link Quality
While link popularity is material, link quality is even more noteworthy. Simply stated, link quality is the reputation of the site linking to you. This reputation includes the significance, relevance, key phrase density, anchor text and several other factors of the referrer. The remainder of this article will focus on these key elements of building link quality.
Significance - The significance of a website refers its prominence, presence or authority. To clarify, think of which is more significant: a backlink from www.microsoft.com or a backlink from www.someunknownwebsite.com. Be aware, significance should not be measured in terms of Google PageRank. PageRank is outdated and has little to do with significance. Looking for proof? Analyze the top ranking sites for your primary keyword phrase on one of the search engines. You will find high ranking websites that have little or no PageRank. Focus your backlink building efforts on significant websites.
Relevance - Spend your time building links on sites that are related to your website theme. A handful of links from highly ranked websites with related content weigh considerably more than hundreds of links from unrelated insignificant websites. Whether you are exchanging links or buying one-way links from a text link broker, focus only on sites that are relevant to your theme. This author favors the self policing nature of article marketing when it comes to relevance. Here is why. Suppose your web site relates to rock climbing. If you publish an article about the health benefits of rock climbing, only webmasters with fitness or rock climbing web sites are likely to republish your article. Those are exactly the webmasters you want to use your article so you get a related site backlink. It is doubtful that webmasters running car insurance web sites will republish your article. No reason for alarm. Their insurance web site is unrelated and a backlink would have little value. Whichever method you use to build backlinks, focus on relevant sites to get best results.
Anchor Text - Anchor text is the part of a link that people click to get where the link goes. Essentially, it is a way to tell visitors and search engine spiders why the link was made. It describes the target web site. For demonstration, the HTML code for a typical link may look like this:
SEO Instructions
The anchor text in this explanation is the 'SEO Instructions' portion of the code. It indicates that the target web site has something to do with SEO information. Search engines pay attention to anchor text and the text surrounding the anchor text. Fortunately, you have some control over this factor when building backlinks. Be sure backlinks pointing to your web site use key phrase rich anchor text. Vary the keywords in the anchor text, keep them descriptive and ensure they are related to the theme of your site.
Once you have optimized your web site, to achieve a top search engine ranking your web site promotion efforts must shift towards optimization of offpage factors. This essentially means boosting your link popularity. You can do this yourself or hire an SEO consulting firm to help. In either case, just be sure you spend your time and money wisely. Focus on getting quality backlinks from high ranking web sites related to your theme. When offpage factors are being optimized, concentrate on quality over quantity.
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