Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [182]
Chapter 19: Week 16: Develop a Complementary Pay-per-Click Campaign
Chapter 20: Week 17: Measure, Measure, Measure
Chapter 21: Week 18: Analyze for Action
Chapter 16
Week 13: Build Links
Now is the time to expand your reach and get others to notice what you have been doing. Chapter 5 covered the basics of on-page SEO and referred to linking, while Chapter 13 covered some of the accessibility issues related to links. Links are the currency of online marketing. Gaining good-quality links to your site will enhance your reputation, increase your search rankings, and make your site more visible to the online audience. This chapter will focus on the primary off-page factor of links, which are so important to the success of your Internet marketing.
Chapter Contents
Monday: Learn How Search Engines Utilize Links
Tuesday: Distinguish Various Link Types and Their Value
Wednesday: Understand How Link Development Mirrors Offline Networking
Thursday: Find Link Opportunities
Friday: Evaluate the Marketing Value of Your Links
Monday: Learn How Search Engines Utilize Links
Links are the “nuts and bolts” of the Internet. Links are the glue that holds together the millions of documents and files in the online world, and it has been that way long before this modern version of the Internet. In the early days of the Web, links (or hyperlinks, as they were originally called) were the primary means of navigating from one document to another. The Internet was referred to as such because all of the documents and files available were connected by a series of hyperlinks.
The entry of Google into the search space launched a new method of determining relevance by the number of links pointing to specific websites, web pages, and documents.
Get Linked
If you’re interested in the origins of Google’s link-based rankings, check out Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s doctoral thesis, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html). This document became the backbone of their research in creating Google. In it, they describe the creation of PageRank to mathematically judge the relevance of pages based on linking structures.
Links mirror human factors. Links are a method of assessing the value of a web page as determined by the relationships established with other websites. Similarly, humans evaluate new business relationships based on the experiences and relationships of other business and the references of others who have used that business.
As webmasters learned about the importance of linking, especially in Google, there became a race to develop links—and as many links as possible—to their websites. This first wave of link building was based primarily on the thinking that more links made more relevance. From this thinking arose the concept of the link farm. Link farms were pages developed with no other purpose than to link to other websites. Typical link farm pages were long pages with nothing more than hyperlinks to web pages, but with no context or descriptive information. They were just lists of links.
Eventually, the evaluation of links was refined to include not just the link itself but the link text. This, of course, set off another firestorm of link acquisitions and an extreme focus on gathering links with keywords in the link text.
The next major level of refinement was the relevance and authority of the linked site. Where you get the link is just as important, if not more important, as the link itself. A link from a popular website is worth tens or hundreds of links from the sources. Beyond that, search engines evaluate the text on the linked page, as well as the linking page, to ensure relevance. The age of links, as well as the age of the domain and various other domain-related factors, are also included in the evaluation.
The content of the website of the outgoing link was compared to the content of the website with the incoming link. One page’s text was compared to the other’s text. The incoming link was evaluated in context of the page,