Search Engine Optimization & What makes a good Backward link

You have almost certainly at some stage got upset when you clicked a link on a web site expecting to find useful information only to be directed to utter garbage or something different to what the link implied. This is not a good link and if a human reviewer was to take a look at this page then the web page to which it was linked might be penalized.

Search engines try to do the same. They try to identify good links.

A search engine will give credit for a link that comes from a similar web page for example a web page about ponds linked from a page talking about ponds will get good marks. The search engine would however only know if the link was a good one if the words in the link mentioned ponds or the site in question has been optimised for the word ponds.

Whenever you use a link therefore do not say merely CLICK HERE since this means nothing to a search engine. It would be far better to say click here for garden ponds discounts for example. You have used a recognizable word on the assumption you are linking to a site about garden ponds.

Now you know this take a look at all the web sites you visit in future. The best sites all use meaningful phrases or sentences as links. The ones who do not know about or do not believe in optimising web pages for search engines have pictures or plain basic buttons such as click here, submit, back, home and so on.

HOME is about the worst. Every web page using home is losing out.

Yes go to your web site NOW and CHANGE it.

Here is a free opportunity to create a perfect link to your home page; after all you wrote it.

Win $1 million of water garden ponds here is much better or at least I believe so especially if your home page keyword choice was water garden ponds and of course if you could afford the $1 million.

HOME tells your visitor nothing and he cannot remember what your home page was about anyway. Why should he bother to go back there?

You can and should write into your links what makes sense and possibly encourages your visitor to go to your page instead of someone elses page.

Makes sense to me and also it appears to make sense to the search engines.

As one of my Australian friends often tells me. He says: Tony, you know something. Common sense is not very common. Dont feel bad if you did not know about this approach to links already, neither did I until it was pointed out to me as being common sense.

You make your web site popular and authoritative by collecting recommendations or links. The more you get the higher will be your popularity.

Make yourself more popular in very general terms

Now we know links into our pages are important and they are especially important if they come from pages of a similar nature or theme. It would make sense to have many web pages on a web site each linking to each other sharing a common subject or theme.

The search engines agree with this approach and reward web sites/pages that are themed to use a currently popular bit of jargon. Once again it is common sense isnt it?

Take a look at this screen shot.

This web page has 13 links at the top of the page (it actually has many more in other areas of the page but they cannot be seen on this shot) all leading the visitor to pages within the same web site. Every other page on this web site has the same links at the top of the page. There are 2 reasons for this:

To improve web page popularity
To assist the visitor to find the way around the whole site easily.

By the way notice the length of the text in some of the links. There is no Home, Back, arrows, click here, Submit and so on. In particular take note of the long text links in the left and right columns which are written to make navigation easier and more meaningful to visitors.

These links appear on each page in exactly the same place.
That words are used to link to the pages in a way that a search engine will give credit hopefully.
There are more links than there are pages on the web site because there are links to related web sites.
Notice also that each page has a link to my book page.
I have not really tried to sell my book on any of these pages. I have just brought the book to the attention of any visitor.
There is encouragement for the customer to help him/herself to something FREE. Chances are therefore good that the visitor will stay more than 0.5 of a second having clicked through to the web page.

As we go through the book I will point out how I improved this type of web page ie the main or home web page. My site today is very different to this one.

If you design a web site say with 20 pages do make sure your home page does link to each page in a way that the search engines can follow:

To allow visitors to navigate easily
To allow search engine spiders to find your other pages easily.

If you cannot create so many links for whatever reason on the home page then find some other mechanism such as a site map to achieve the same objective. It is important to get to your secondary web pages easily the deeper the crawl required by a search engine the less the chance your web page will be found and indexed.

Did I say this earlier? If not I should have done. Avoid going more than two levels deep on your web site.

When you go to Google or any other search engine you are not searching the web at that instant in time. You are searching what Googles spider (Googlebot) crawled some time earlier and Google indexed some time after that and then added to its massive database of over 3 billion web pages.

Typically it might take between 4 and 8 weeks for a spidered page to show up in Googles database. It is rare that Google will include all linked pages on the first crawl. It possibly will however eventually index most of your pages over time so long as it can find a link to each and every page.

If your web site is not in Googles index it will never be found by searching Google ... it is not possible. Most searchers and many web site owners do not know this.

Link analysis continued