Good linkages are important for your page rank too!

Wondering why some pages are very well optimized (with lots of keywords) and still not rank as high as the other pages that has less keywords?

The answer might lie here.. the pages which rank high might have a lot of good links (will define good below) to its pages. Many search marketing experts claims that as little as 25 high-quality links to a site can increase its ranking in search engine significantly. However, links from 25 non-related sites will not help to rank a page any higher.

Google places a very heavy weight in link popularity. Others, might not weight it as strong as Google, still place an important weight for links in their ranking algorithms.

So does that mean you just need to work on getting as much links as possible, and you can rank high? Well... It depends...

We need to look at the followings:
1) Link Quantity
2) Link Quality
3) Anchor Text
4) Link Relevancy

Link Quantity
- Usually, page got more links should rank higher. However, not all links created equal. We still need to look at the quality. If the quality is the same, we will look at quantity. For example, if my site has 10 grade A links and yours has 5 grade A links, mine will rank higher than yours.

Link Quality
- It concerns about where your links are from. If your links are from a very popular site (a site with lots of links to it), this linkage is a good linkage.However, when comparing links from 2 sites with the same high popularity, one link is 1 of 5 available links from the popular site A and the other link is 1 of the 50 available links from the popular site B, of course the link from site B will be seen as of higher quality.

Anchor Text
- Anchor text is very important to search engines as it is the text a visitor clicks and to follow a link. It is one of the key page ranking factor in the search engine algorithms. Page search queries tend to return the linked page that have variants of the queried terms in anchor text.

Link Relevancy
- Since words can have different meaning, it is not enough for anchor text to use similar words. The links you get have to be contextually relevant to your site. Search engine will look at the words around the anchor text, words on the entire page and the entire page being linked from. By doing this, search engines can return pages which are more relevant and useful from a search query.

Some Don'ts or Things to beware of:
Don't try to fool search engines by doing the following stupid link tricks. You can jeopadize your site ranking by doing so:

1) Blog Spamming - Do not mass posting comment on unrelated blogs with your URL to impress search engine (increase one way links)

2) Guest Book Spamming - Do not mass posting comment on unrelated Guest books to increase one way links

3) Link Farms - Do not try to artificially build link popularity by fabricating sites that have have many links to the sites you want to boost traffic. Do not post your site in link farms nor set up numerous sites just to contain thousands of your URL be crawled by search engines. Search engines will penalize your site if found. Your competitors or anyone can report your trick to search engines (see the next post).

4) Hidden links - Do not load up hidden links on high ranking pages to the pages you want to boost traffic

5) Link E-mail spam - Do not use a software to spam different webmasters requesting links from their sites

6) Fake two way links - Many site will link to yours if you agree to put their links on your page. However, some try to trick you and other webmasters by utilizing links cannot be detected by search engine. By doing this, not only you are not getting the reciprocal linkages, but only your "partner" is getting credit from you for the more valuable one way link.