Part 6 – Offpage Search Engine Optimization II
In the last article, we talked about how getting high quality links from
authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This
time, we’re going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to
determine and obtain “high quality” links. We’re also going to talk briefly
about Google’s PageRank.
First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but
we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that
matter are
1)
The address which it links to
2) The
text of the link
3) The
PageRank of the page on which the link resides
Let’s analyze this information one by one. First, you’d naturally want
the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual
post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated
website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page
instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.
The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword.
Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link
that says “Barbie dolls” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense,
right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms
“technological” or “gadget”, it will greatly boost your rankings for those
keywords. Hence, it’s essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from
other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate
keywords.
Now, about Google’s PageRank. It’s basically a scale set by Google to
measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/.
What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the
more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course,
the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search
engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits
SEO-wise.
Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0)
because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your
blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and
depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will also
rise eventually.
Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targetted
visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines
to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine
results.