Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [57]
Age of Links
Another factor in evaluating links that counts toward the quality of the link is the age of the link. This is a factor that rewards longevity to websites that have been valuable resources of content for many years.
Offline, many people will establish a business’s credibility by asking how many years the business has been in operation. Longer seems to be better and is more trustworthy. This same evaluation is framed online, because sites that have older established links tend to rank highly based on the age of those links. It shows that they have been around longer and have survived the many tribulations of the online world.
Optimizing and Evaluating Your Link Text
On Tuesday we covered the importance of link anchor text. The anchor text that is used in displaying the link provides the context for the page and content that is the destination of that link. The same follows for websites linking to you.
Naturally, most anchor text links to your website will be the text of your domain address, not using keywords, but just the simple hypertext URL. This is the most common form of linking from one site to another. Site owners linking to your site are not usually motivated to use anchor text.
Making the most of link text requires two specific actions. First is optimizing the current links to your website, that is, asking those site owners who are linking to you to use words in the link rather than just the URL. Second—and more difficult—is developing new links from other websites with your preferred anchor text being used in the link.
This is where available link survey tools can be of great assistance. By spidering the sites that link to you, many tools can provide you with the page that links to your site, the destination page of that link, and the text that is being used in the link. This gives you a very substantial starting point in developing a plan for optimizing your current links and pursuing new ones. You may also want to include a few competitor sites in this survey in order to view the links acquired by their sites. This way, it may help in finding additional sources or directories for links.
Tools for evaluating links are endless. In Chapter 4, we covered how the webmaster tools provided by the search engines are a place to start. You can always move into the realm of some paid or subscription-based software or services that will monitor your links as well.
Friday: See SEO in Practice
Learning the basics of SEO is always a very elementary task—it seems easy, and it makes sense. Using keywords in prominent content areas on the site and in links isn’t rocket science. But in my opinion, it is both an art and a science. The science is the mathematical part of the algorithm that accounts for all the keywords in conjunction with their locations, placement, frequency, and related topics on the web pages and in links. The art is in using these factors and placing them together to create a page that visitors find persuasive enough to take the action you want them to take.
Gaining rankings is only the first part of marketing your website. Getting people to your website is just the beginning; getting them to take action is the second part, and it requires both the art and science to create to right circumstances for your visitors.
SEO Examples
In a health-related search such as tinnitus, the results from the different search engines are fairly consistent. There are sites that are regularly in the top few results. In examining the consistencies among those sites, you can begin to see the patterns of SEO emerge. In Figure 5-10, the results from Google and Bing show the rankings based on the on-page and off-page factors.
Figure 5-10: Google and Bing results for tinnitus
The results are remarkably similar; Wikipedia is one of the top results. The main reason for this is that Wikipedia fits many of the criteria for good search engine