Link-Building SEO - Link Value
Link-building SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has two main purposes: To increase traffic to a website and to improve the website's ranking in search engines. Generally, the more incoming backlinks a website has, the higher it will rank. However, it's not all about the quantity of the incoming links, it's also very much about the quality of the incoming links. Dozens of weak backlinks often don't add up to the value of one or two strong valuable links. Google and other search engines consider a website with a lot of strong incoming links to be important, and consequently it will rank higher. So what determines the value of a backlink? There are a number of factors.
1) Anchor text. Quite simply, anchor text is the text that is visible to someone looking at the link. For example, clicking on a link to a car insurance company like Progressive might take you to progressive.com, but the text you see and click on might read "auto insurance". Anchor text that is descriptive about the website or web page has greater value than a simple URL link when it comes to link building SEO.
2) Page authority. Backlinks from websites and web pages that Google considers to be important have greater value than those from websites and web pages Google does not consider to be important. If your website has an incoming link from nasa.gov, that backlink would carry much more value than a backlink from billspetshop.com.
3) Number of other links. If your link is the only link on a web page it will have much more value than a link on a web page with dozens of other links. The easiest way to think of this is in numerical terms. If the page has a weight of 100 and your link is the only link on the page, than it will receive 100% of the value. However, if your link shares the page with 20 other links it will receive only 5% value.
4) Domain age. The age of the domain the backlink is coming from can influence its value. Google and other search engines trust older established websites more than new websites.
5) Relevancy. If the web page the backlink is coming from is all about scrapbooking and the backlink leads to another site about scrapbooking, the backlink has much more value than if it leads to a website about exotic cars. Google weighs the value of all incoming links to a website, link building SEO is about building links that work together in concert around a common relevant theme.
