Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [53]
Thursday: Explore the Power of Off-Page Ranking Factors
The primary component of off-page factors is incoming links from other websites. Links are factors that you can affect but not control as you can the on-page elements. The search engines rely heavily on the incoming links (or back-links), because these indicate your website’s reputation. My father always had this bit of advice about reputation: “There is what you say about yourself, and then there is what others say about you.” You can sell, position, create, and persuade all that you can on your website. However, a significant portion of the ranking algorithm depends on how other websites link to your website. The best way to explain this in human terms is that a link from another website is like a word-of-mouth referral. Business owners all know that the best business comes from referrals. Referrals are the best marketing available, because they are free and largely based on your reputation and performance.
The same applies to websites and search engine value. High-quality websites that link to your website are providing a strong word-of-mouth referral. Sites that do well in gaining those referrals will be considered to be more relevant and trustworthy. This brings us to a primary factor in search engine optimization—the benefit of high-quality referrals in the form of links from other websites. This section covers the why of linking, while Chapter 16 will cover the how. It might seem like a leap in time to wait that long, but it all comes together in a logical flow, once the basics are covered.
Benefits of Links
Link building has never been described by anybody as “fun.” In fact, it is one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks in website marketing and SEO. Finding link partners and link opportunities is very much like cold-calling in sales. However, it’s a necessary task for many websites and one that needs to be done when rankings need to be improved.
There are three primary benefits of links. Although gaining rankings is the primary purpose of many webmasters, other aspects tend to be overlooked. The “golden link” is the link that provides high rankings, great sales and leads, and a powerful branding agent that increases your visibility and credibility. If you can gain a link that provides visitors, sales, and increased rankings, you can reward yourself for a job very well done. Those are valuable links and will provide many tangible benefits for your work.
Rankings
Of course, most online marketers are after rankings. It is a known fact that a great lead from a high-authority website can boost your rankings in a matter of days. Sites that are considered authorities carry weight in the ranking algorithm. While all search engines evaluate link in different ways, Google tends to be the center of attention because it provides the market share of searchers. In the early days of search engines, Google gained notoriety based on the relevance and great results provided to searchers. Much of this was because of the linking aspect of the algorithm. Most other search engines were only concerned with on-page factors and not evaluating links. Even to this day, the other search engines still seem to use links from other websites and links within a website, but not much attention is focused on understanding that aspect of their algorithm.
In Google, this link value measurement is called PageRank. Gaining a link from a site high in PageRank will carry some of the linking “weight” from the authority site to your website.
The PageRank is displayed in the Google Toolbar, and when it was first launched, both