What is that Link Worth?

When doing search engine optimization, it’s crucial to focus on a link building campaign. Before you jump in, let’s look at the value of a link. Each link has a different value, and we’re going to take a look at some things that search engines look for.

When you build links, one of the things you want to heavily focus on is the anchor text of the link. The anchor text is the text users and click on. If you create a link, you have the pieces of text inside the brackets, which tells the computer where to visit. The part that you actually see outside of the brackets is called anchor text. You’ll sometimes see a phrase that says, click here and it’s an underlined link. This is an example of wasted anchor text. You want your anchor text to be relevant to your site. Anchor text should have keywords or key phrases that describe the page or site. Another thing that helps determine the strength of a site is the popularity when it comes to your actual topic. If you have a website about cell phones, and a lot of other cell phone websites are pointing to you, it shows the search engines that you’re a relevant site, because a lot of similar sites point to you as a good source.

Site popularity is important both in your main topic, as well as across the board. How popular is your website? Does it get a lot of web traffic? Do a lot of different sites link into you? Do you have valuable content on your site. Does the entire site have a theme? Are there similar words and phrases on your topic? Are the links coming into your site based around those same topics? Search engines also look at your page content to see not only if you have the keywords it’s looking for, but also words that make sense on your topic. If you have a website on cats, it may also look for words like feline, cat health, kittens, and other common similar groupings of words.

What are you linking out to? Do the links leaving your blog go to relevant on topic sites? Or do they not make sense? If you have a website on fruit juice, but you’re linking out to credit card websites, this pattern doesn’t match. It’s also important to have good outgoing links that go to authority sites, or sites of similar nature. If you’re linking out to junk sites, you may be penalized.