Link Building

Hypertext links are what you click on to move throughout the Internet. They go a long way to establish your authority as an expert in your field. The more incoming links you have from web sites that are in the same field as yours, help to build your relevancy with regard to your theme. Link popularity, also called link juice, measures the quality and quantity of links pointing to a web site. All the major engines use it. Links to or from low-quality or un-relevant sites do nothing to help your search engine ranking, in fact they may even hurt it. Linking to the highest quality sites in your niche will establish your expertise, your authority. Quality, quantity, anchor text and relevancy are what search engines are looking at when gauging link popularity.

Quality

Link quality flows from one site to another. It is determined by the authority of both the host site and also the site linking to it. Google uses PageRank which is a link analysis algorithm to determine the quality and quantity of its inbound links. Your link building strategy must always consider the quality of links, both inbound and outbound.

Quantity

Needless to say, the more quality inbound and outbound links you have to your web site the stronger your search engine optimization. In fact, there are many sites ranking high in search engines that have virtually no SEO, except for thousands of quality inbound links. That just goes to show how much weight Google, Yahoo and Bing place on link juice. Unfortunately, obtaining all those quality links takes a lot of time.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable part on the link that’s often times blue. Anchor text is probably the most powerful component in link popularity. When you optimize a page for specific keywords, you want other pages linking to that page to use for those keywords. Using “Click Here” as linking text adds nothing to your page optimization. Rankings can occur just based on anchor text, so we know that the search engine algorithms give them a lot of weight.

Relevancy

Relevancy is determined by your authority in your niche. The search engines want to give the searcher the best possible answer to their question. If you can establish yourself as an obvious expert, you have the best possible chance of ranking high on a search engine results page (SERP). Having keyword-rich linking text incoming and outgoing links creates a connection and helps to classify your site and determine it’s relevancy.

Link Juice

Link building takes a lot of meticulous work, because you can’t completely control who is linking to you. Link building is not fun. It’s time consuming, repetitive, risky and has low ROI. Obviously though, you need links.