Linking; Its 80% of Why you Rank
When it comes to getting your site to rank the biggest part of any search algorithm is going to be focused on linking. No matter how much these algorithms progress, get altered and tweaked linking will always be the dominant determining factor in the ranking process.
There are three types of links; inbound, outbound and internal.
1. In Bound Links
Inbound links are the most important. They are the links that other webmasters put on their sites that point to your site. There are a few elements to these inbound links you want to think about. Links are the very high way of the internet. They help determine how popular your site is, what terms it should rank for and how often it gets crawled by search engine spiders.
The “Anchor Text” used in the links pointing to your site is critical as not only is that inbound link a “vote” as they say for your site, but further what might that “vote” be for? This is where proper anchor text comers into play. Anchor text is the very phrase someone uses in the link on their site to yours. So, if your site were about “Chili Dogs” and a fellow webmaster put on a link on their site you would want the actual link, the very thing you click, to be Chili Dogs. Why? Because if someone is searching the internet to buy chili dogs you want to rank as high as you can for that term, and having links, with that term as the anchor text, on as many sites as possible is going to help you do that.
The code for that would look something like this;
<a href="http://www.superdawgz.com">chili Dogs</a> - For the best, most outrageously hot chili dogs in the land visit SuperDawgz!
When someone puts a link from there site to yours you might want to politely ask if they wouldn’t mind coding the link like the above example.
2. Out Bound Links
For many years web masters were loathe to put out bound links on their sites to other sites that were not linking back. This was caused by a fear of losing hard earned visitors and Page Rank leakage. Furthermore, webmasters put all of these out bound links all on one page in laundry list fashion. Today, most search engine algorithms reward sites, through higher rankings, for making them as user friendly as possible. What does that mean? It means provide useful, relevant links sprinkled throughout your site that would benefit your users. For example if your site, SuperDawgz.com had a section talking about a really great chili sauce and one of the key ingredients to that sauce was from a company sohotyoucry.com you might want to have a sentence like;
When making the sauce add liberally hot powder # 9 from our good friends at <a href="http://www.sohotyoucry.com">http://www.sohotyoucry.com/</a>
Even better would be to make the link to sohotyoucry.com be the words “hot powder”. Now you have an outbound link, using anchor text that is highly relevant to the subject matter of the page. This might look like this;
When making the sauce add liberally <a href="http://www.sohotyoucry.com">hot powder</a> # 9 from our good friends at sohotyoucry.com.
3. Internal Linking
This type of linking has to do with the navigation of your site, the links you click to get from page to page. These links are important as you need to make them as crawl able as possible. The majority of the inbound links to your site are going to be to the home page. So, when the search engine spider comes along and hits your homer page you want to make it as easy as possible for that spider to move right on through to the rest of your site. If these links to your interior pages are images for example, that’s not going to help. Make sure the links you have are easy for search engine spiders.
