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Link Quality

SEO Tutorial - Reciprocal Links

'Learn to swim, and once you've learned 'SWIM' John Lennon
Anyone who knows anything about Search Engine Optimisation will tell you that the quantity, quality and context of the links that point to your site play a major role in determining how your site ranks.

Success on the web can no longer be guaranteed by having good 'on page' factors such as keyword rich Content or tightly focused pages, although both are important factors in the way that search engines ultimately rank your pages.

Nor is ensuring that the underlying code of your pages is error free, search engine friendly and validates. Unless your site is well linked to from other sites that focus on a similar keyphrase set, your pages will never rank for any competitive term.

Reciprocal Link Quality

Have you ever read or written a thesis? If you have, you will know that it is normal to see a list of resources or papers that were referenced while compiling the thesis. The purpose of pointing to these resources is to provide substance and further information about the points being made. If the thesis contains valuable and original information and was written by a respected authority figure then the value of the resources sited must also be of value.

This is exactly how search engines look at the pages that link to you. Are the pages an authority? If they are, it's kudos to you.

Reciprocal Link Quantity

As well as the authority or quality, quantity is also a measure that is taken into account. It is important to understand that search engine Spiders map the web by following links from page to page and from site to site. The more links you have pointing to your site the easier it is for the spiders to find your pages. The pages of a well linked site will be spidered more often; so changes and new pages will be found faster, making it easier to evaluate the effectiveness of the new content.

Links are not just signposts to your site for search engines; they also drive substantial amounts of targeted visitors to your site. This is another reason to ensure that the sites that link to you are related is some way to your site; unless you have a casino site there is no point in getting a link from one. Non-targeted visitors will just bounce away leaving you wondering why your visitors are not producing sales or enquiries.

Most spidering search engines now measure the quality and quantity of links that point to your site. Google have named this measure PageRank. Each page that Google knows about is awarded PageRank (Google's measure of importance). PageRank can be seen by downloading the Google Toolbar.

Reciprocal Link Context

All spidering search engines now use some form of link analysis along the lines of Google's PageRank, however if results depended on PageRank alone, sites like Amazon, Google or Microsoft that have very high PageRank would top every search. This is not the case because context and relevancy are also measures that have to be taken into account.

Look upon a link to your site as a vote for your site and the words used to make that link the context of the vote. So if the words used to form the link to your site were 'search engine optimisation' this tells the search engine what the vote is for i.e. the context of the vote.

This context of the vote passes relevancy onto the page that the link points to for the terms contained within the link. It should be noted that graphic links or banners break this keyword chain and do not pass over keyword relevancy.

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