Link building

Building Link Popularity is a great way to help your site gain competitive PageRank (PR).
A little care in developing links will go a long way in getting your site ranked high in Search Engines.

PageRank of the linking page PageRank of the linking page, one of the most important factors, determines how much valuable importance is passed on to your page.
The higher the PageRank of the page linking to you, the higher the value you get.

Each link to your Web site is considered a vote. If your neighbour states in public that you are very trustworthy, or that you are his best friend (Google PageRank 2), this is of course a less important vote than when the President of your country says the same (Google PageRank 9).

Number of links on the linking page

The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PageRank value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page.
Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 outgoing links is much better than getting a link from a PR4 page that has 60 outgoing links.
With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links.

It is therefore as important to evaluate the total number of outgoing links on a links page, as it is, to evaluate the PR of the linking page.
This is where many people often falter, as they usually insist on getting a link from a high PR page, but if that page has 100 outgoing links, your page would only get 1/100th of that value.

Industry relevance

Search engines give higher importance to links pointing to your site from your own industry segment as opposed to those from unrelated industries.
A link on a site about motor sports will do very little good for a restaurant site, however a link in a food services directory will likely have high relevance.

Searching industry relevance pages:
Search for similar pages once you have found a really good page.
Look for "similar pages", "related pages" or "more like this" next to entries in any search engine's results list.
Alternatively use the Page Specific Search on the Google Advanced Search screen.

Page relevance

Most sites offering links have several categories listed on their sites. Try to get a link from a category that closely matches your own industry.

For instance, if you have a site related to hotels, then, on your partner site, a tickets site for example, try to identify a resource directory pertaining to hotels, resorts, reservations, vacation packages, travel, tourism, food and beverages, etc.

An algorithm called “Applied Semantics” determines the industry relevance of a page within a site. The Applied Semantics algorithm studies various keywords on a Web page and tries to determine the industry or business segment of each page. Applied Semantics estimates the industry segments that are relevant to a particular page.

Anchor-Text

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text on a Web page.
Since anchor text is very important, make sure that your most important keywords appear in the anchor text from the link pointing to your site.

It tells search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google.
If you use "click here" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click here". If you use "Part 2" as the anchor text, your telling the search engines the page is discussing "part 2".
You wouldn't want to rank highly for "click here" or "Part 2".

However, if your site is all about purple widgets, you don't want only "purple widgets" to be used as the phrase in every link to your site. Over-optimizing like that would create an unnatural pattern.

You can use anchor text in:

• External links – links from other sites.
• Internal links – links on your pages.
• Navigation maps.
• Links on your main page. A very important spot.

Remember that real live humans will read your links as well as search engines, so the words in your anchor text need to make sense!

Dynamic link pages

You should also watch out for any link pages that are generated dynamically.
Chances are that such pages would not get indexed soon enough, which means that a link from such a page would not benefit you.
Some dynamic link pages are intentionally generated in such a way so as to prevent them from getting indexed. Some unscrupulous webmasters do this to trick you to prevent any PageRank leaking from their site to yours.
Links from such pages therefore do not give you any benefit.

Examples of dynamic links include URLs containing symbols such as “?” or “&”.

Javascript link pages

It is also important to identify pages that are generated through Flash or a JavaScript, as Search Engines cannot read Flash pages nor can they read the links embedded within Flash.

These are some of the tricks unethical webmasters use. While such a site may claim to have placed a link to your Web page, in effect they are not giving you any benefit.

Redirected links

A link that is first redirected to another page within your partner site before pointing to your site is a redirected link.

You should watch out for such links, as search engines do not give weight to redirected links. It is very unlikely that your site would draw any benefit from a redirected link.