Inbound Links Part 1 - The Factors

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By David L. Felts

It's no secret that inbound links are what make or break a site when
it comes to search engine positioning. The more inbound links you have
from quality sites, the higher your own site will rank. If the anchor
text of those links and the theme of the sending site are related to
the theme of your site, you'll get even more of a boost.

But building links is tough. In today's competitive market, you have
to do something to get your site noticed. Once your site has been
noticed, judgment will be made by the court of public opinion. If your
site gives visitors something they find valuable, they will tell
people and, occasionally, link to your site.

When it comes to inbound links, there are five main factors:

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the actual words that make up the link. These words are
very important. They should relate to your web site and, most
important, should vary. A lot of links with the same anchor text gives
them the appearance of not being natural links, but rather links that
have been purchased, swapped for, or automatically generated.

To keep search engines from mistakenly (or correctly) classifying your
inbound links as not natural, use as much variation as possible in the
anchor text of those links. When a thousand inbound links to your site
show up, all with the anchor text of "buy widgets here", it's pretty
apparent to the search engines that these links aren't natural.

When I do link building by commissioning blog posts, my preference is
to not make any anchor text recommendations at all. I like the blogger
to check out my site and come up with his or her own anchor text. In
cases where the blogger is insistent that I proved anchor text, I
provide a list for him or her to choose from instead of giving the
same links every time.

Link Quality

Where a link originates from is very important. A link from a popular,
well-trafficked site that's been online for years and already ranks
well in the search engines is worth a lot more than a link from your
friend's new blog. A few 'quality' links will do a lot more for your
rank than a bunch of links from newer, less established sites.

PageRank is factor link builders use to determine the 'quality' of a
site. Other tings to look at are how long has the site been around,
how many pages does it have indexed, and how much traffic it gets.

Link Volume

Link volume is the number of inbound links. Generally, the more
inbound links a site has, the more important it's determined to be, as
long as it doesn't run afoul of the two factors mentioned above.

Time to Appear

There's discussion among webmaster about whether or not how quickly
links appear is considered. If a few thousands back links to your site
appear all of a sudden, all with the same or close to the same anchor
text, it will probably send up a red flag.

Other factors come into play here as well: is it just a link? What's
the content around the link? What the quality of the site it appeared
on? How does the theme of the site it appeared on related to your
site? Did the links show up all in a clump (over a day or two) and
then nothing? These are all reasons why you have to be careful with
any sort of automated link building approach because natural links
tend to build up over time and typically don't come all at once.

Link Age

How long a link has been around is also a factor. Links that are only
there for a month or two will probably not help when it comes to
enhancing your site's search engine position.

When most search engines discover a link, they'll keep an eye on it
for a while before they give any credit too it. This is specifically
to combat link buying, so that you can't buy a link on a highly ranked
site and see an immediate result. There's no consensus on how old a
link needs to be before it counts, but there is consensus that the
longer the link has been there, the more value it has.

Summary

It's easy to find discussion on whether or not inbound links can hurt
a site's ranking. The generally accepted theory is that they can't,
since a web site owner has no control over who links to them.
Personally, I'm not so sure. It never hurts to be careful, so before
you purchase a link on any site, check the stats on it: Page Rank,
Alexa Rank, number of pages indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN and the
number of back links showing in Google, Yahoo and MSN. I recommend
staying away from sites that don't have good numbers.

Although ranking sites using inbound links as a factor on the surface
seems democratic enough (the web community votes for what it likes by
linking too it) it creates a catch 22: if you can't get your site
ranked so people can see it then how can they link to it so it can
rank?

Enter the process I'll discuss in Part 2, link building.....

Dave Felts is an experienced web developer and Internet Marketer.
Learn more about Internet marketing, online advertising, and making
money online at http://www.Bloggertizer.com - a free web site that
helps bring bloggers and advertisers together for the benefit of both.
You can reach him at webmaster@bloggertizer.com

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