Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [185]
Without physical boundaries, people of like interests can find each other and share important information within that interest and create a community of publishers and consumers. In this methodology, opinion leaders easily can be identified, because the spread of information within a community will typically start with a link on their site and spread among the community. “Bridges” will emerge as the point of information between communities.
If you are fascinated by this information, check out some of Broder’s numerous scholarly works on the topic of linking communities and developing link value:
A Taxonomy of Web Search: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=792552.
The Web and Social Networks: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1046971.
The Future of Web Search: From Information Retrieval to Information Supply: www.springerlink.com/content/u23uq83n96r255l0/.
Links Are Word-of-Mouth Referrals
In all, the goal of the search engine is to provide the closest measure of human judgment as possible. On-page factors are within the site owner’s full control. Links, however, are in the control of your market. As my father used to say, “There’s what you say about yourself, and then there’s what others say about you. People tend to believe what others say.” The same principle applies through links.
Links are a method of showing value. A person links to a website when they see something of interest, relevance, or value. When this happens, the person linking to the site is casting a vote for the importance of that page, or that site, for that specific subject. In this method of analysis, search engines use the voting system to determine why certain sites are considered more important than other websites.
However, the votes are certainly weighted based on the importance of a site. In other words, not all votes are equal. Search engines evaluate the incoming links to a site and then look at the sites linking to those sites. Then they look at the sites linking to those sites, and so on. Sites with high authority provide authoritative approval of a website when they link and in doing so spread their “credibility” to the linked site.
Site managers can say or do whatever they want on their websites, but if the market does not appreciate or value it, then they will not link to it. It is truly a capitalistic system of gaining links to your site, because people vote with their link. If they like your site and it provides value, it will receive links. If not, it won’t. The Web is very democratic in that good sites will attract attention and referrals and bad sites won’t. (Some very low-quality sites are able to find methods of gaining links that make them appear to be relevant and important. You will not find those techniques in this book, because I don’t recommend that business owners or marketing managers pursue those techniques. They are very short-term strategies, and search engines have allocated teams of engineers to identify and remove those sites from the index.)
The word-of-mouth aspect of linking will be explored more on Tuesday.
Tuesday: Distinguish Various Link Types and Their Value
Just as not all links from other websites are equal, not all links within your own website are equal. Site links each have a specific purpose, and the value of those links are based on the purpose they provide to your visitors. Search engines typically employ a page breakdown called block-level analysis. In this analysis, the page is broken down into typical “blocks” of information, such as navigation, content, advertising, footer information, and so on. This way, search engines can more efficiently determine the differences between the different purposes of site links based on their location within the page.
Navigation Links
Navigation links are the primary method of internal