Back in the early days of Internet search you could rank high for any given term by simply repeating it throughout your content. And that what SEO basically was at the time: stuffing your pages with keywords. The search engines of today are much more sophisticated, there are a lot more factors in the game and SEO is more about off-site activities. No matter how you look at it link authority (the quantity and quality of incoming links to a site) is the single most powerful rank determining factor. Strong linking profile can make up for any lack of onpage optimization and bring a website to the top of search results.
It’s obvious that you need to build links to achieve and maintain high search engine rankings. The question is what kind of links do you need? Sure, ‘relevant and quality’ ones. This standard SEO reply goes on like a broken record all over the web. Knowing that no two links are equal let’s see what factors determine the link value.
Type of Link
First of all there are several types of links but only two of them have influence on your rankings: text links and image links. Text links are known to be far more powerful than image ones. Java Script links and similar link types are not read or followed by search engine spiders and therefore pass no SEO value.
Anchor Text
Anchor text (the clickable part of a link) is the second most important link value factor. Your web page will rank higher for the words in the anchor texts of the links pointing to it. That’s why it’s important to build links with your targeted keywords in the anchor text rather then the name of your website, company or general ‘learn more’ types of links. It’s also a good idea though to slightly vary the anchor texts to have a more ‘natural’ linking profile.
Note: Alt text of an image link works similar to the anchor text of a text link but it has less influence on your rankings.
Age of the Linking Page/Domain
Age of the domain and the page a link sits on in particular is a major piece in the link value puzzle. Google and other search engines give more weight to links coming from old trusted domains and web pages that have been around for sometime.
Incoming/Outgoing Links of the Linking Page
Link authority of the page linking to your site has a direct impact on the SEO value the link passes on to you. Links from web pages that have a lot of quality links from authority sites are most powerful. You also need to consider the number of outgoing links the page has because the link value is equally distributed among them. For instance, if your link is the only one on the page you get all of the link love, when there are 2 links – you receive half of the link value and so on.
Nofollow or Dofollow
More and more websites tend to put ‘rel nofollow’ attribute to outgoing links. This tag tells the search engine spiders not to follow the link and the link is not counted when determining the ranking power. Although nofollow links don’t pass any SEO value they can still be useful in terms of traffic.
These are some of the most important link value factors you should keep in mind when building links to your website. There’re special SEO tools that will save you lots of time putting all these factors together and determining the exact link value you get from each link pointing to your site. Knowing how much link love you get from your SEO efforts helps you plan your link building, analyze the results and improve your optimization strategy. Link authority and its growth rate are critical indicators of how well a site will perform in the SERPs for a given term.
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