Link Quantity and Quality - Take the Advice of an SEO Consultant

Link Quantity and Quality - Take the Advice of an SEO Consultant
By Tom Greaves

There was a time early on in my career as an SEO consultant when optimising for Google was pretty straight forward. All that was needed back then was your keywords in the right places on your page as very little if anything was attributed to off page factors.

However times have changed and the major search engines had to take action to stop spammers from keyword stuffing and confusing the indexing process. In doing this search engines like Google turned more towards off page factors in that every indexed site that linked back to you was a vote for your site and sheer quantity of links put your site nicely at the top of the serps.

Again spammers adapted to the practice and sites that were known as link farms came forward listing masses of unrelated sites in order to build up huge link popularity. Google and the other search engines had to tweak their system and decided to put most ranking weight on the quality rather than the quantity of links to any given page.

What is a quality link? Well first of all lets start with the basics there are many names for links to your site and it is a good idea to define them at this point. Inbound or back links refer to links that point at your pages from else where on the web, reciprocal links are when that same link to your page receives a link pointing back at it from the same page. Many think that a reciprocal link relates to sites however it only relates to pages that are bound. Reciprocal links hold no real weight anymore due to their artificially constructed nature. One way back links are links that point to your page with no returning link, these are the links you are going to need to rank high in the serps.

However that's not the end of the story, there are other aspects of a quality link that you need to understand. You need to look for links from pages that have a high PageRank, this may not be easy but it is what you should aim for. You also need to make sure the page the link comes from is highly relevant to your own, this is one of the most important factors. When your creating links you need to anchor the link with your keyword text, this will increase your keyword authority and link popularity. Last but not least do not get back links from pages with over 100 outgoing links as it will hold little weight and could effect your page.

Being an SEO consultant you get to see and advice people that still do not understand the basic concepts of link building and are using link farms and irrelevant pages to create links from which hold little if no weight.

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