Introducing the concept of links in relation to web marketing

You link to me and I will link to you so both of us can become more popular. Links on a web page enable the visitor to move around within and without a web site easily. At least it should be easy and logical from your visitors point of view.

Search engines, as we know, are critical to web marketing success. It is believed that 50% of any web sites visitors will probably arrive at the site or page from a direct search query. By this I mean if a searcher types in good cheddar cheese he will be taken directly to a page about good cheddar cheese. On the other hand the searcher may have come from a link elsewhere maybe the searcher had been looking at a completely different site about English cheeses and saw a link to the site about good cheddar cheese.

When I review my own web sites logs I find that about 54% of all page views come from search engines directly, 25% from links outside my site, about 10% from links within the same domain and the rest from bookmarks and other means (change a lot since 2002).

Assuming these results are typical then by focusing solely upon keyword usage to drive traffic to your site will limit the amount of traffic to your site. It is obvious that to maximize traffic a strategy of getting links to your web pages/web sites must be incorporated into your web marketing work.

It just so happens that this is how the search engines also think. Indeed their thinking appears to be leaning towards the quality web page linking approach for determining high rankings.

Take a look at this screen shot from Google for the search term garden ponds:

On the basis of keyword usage on the page alone none of these sites should have ranked so highly based upon my knowledge/beliefs. For example not one of the top 3 SERPs had a single bit of link text on the page returned with the keyword in it. Take a look at the use of keywords on the three home pages for the SERPs. The table below summarises the keyword information for each page. All three for example did have the words garden ponds in the Title.

Keywords information

URL in rank order (best to worst) Total inward links Total all words on page Total on page In Title In link text In actual link In header In body text

• Patio-garden-ponds 20 99 5 1 0 1 2 0

• Gardenponds 204 738 4 1 0 0 0 2

• Pondmarket 224 1714 1 1 0 0 0 0

We will revisit this topic and table later when we talk about keyword density and link properties in general. One thing is certain about these sites they can all benefit from optimisation. It would probably be easy for gardenponds.com to get to number 1 position. So why not? The answer may be that the web designer does not know how to or no-one is paying attention to the SERPs.

Pondmarket.com could also overtake patio-garden-ponds.com in my opinion.

The probable reason at least two of these sites became top performers was almost certainly the amount of incoming links or high link popularity. This does not however explain why patio-garden-ponds.com ranked number 1 with only 10% of the quantity of links the web pages in positions 2 and 3 had. We will delve into this in more detail a bit later for the time being just take note that this kind of analysis is important to get a leg up the SERPs tables and therefore higher visitor numbers to your site.

Incoming links using the words of Google developers Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page indicate relevance and to a lesser degree quality of the web page. PageRank on the other hand indicates the quality of a web page. Googles main aim has always been to deliver quality results.

These two concepts are very important in our attempts to rank highly on a SERP.

In general on-page factors have an unknown but finite limit to their ranking value in terms of SERPs whilst PageRank does not. For this reason the best optimised page in the world will lose out to a high PageRank Page with large link numbers and only minimal attempts at optimisation for keyword use. This we know from reading the research paper published by Brin and Page in 1998.

We will leave PageRank until later and just discuss anchor links and anchor links text for the time being. Just bear in mind PageRanks critical importance especially for highly competitive searches as you read on. PageRank is a trade mark term of Google.