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Monday, December 10, 2007

How valuable is a link to your website?

I found an interesting article here which details the factors that affect the quality of an incoming link to your website. This isn't simply the opinion of one person but instead they interviewed 17 leading SEO experts for their opinion on which factors are the most important.

The idea behind this research was to determine which factors professionals from the field of SEO consider to be of influence on the value of a link. Because most of us understand the value of links in terms of traffic, this research mainly focuses on the value that search engines may allocate to a link

I won't go into detail here and I encourage you to go and read the article if you are responsible for your website's promotion, however I have summarised the most important factors here for you to take away:

1. Anchor text - This is the wording used to link to your website. For example, we try to focus on the keywords "Web Design Berkshire" so if we were to link to our site with the words "Pink Elephants for Sale" then the search engines would think we sold pink elephants. It is important to use the keywords that you are targeting to point to your site.
2. Page authority of linking site - If the page that is linking to your site is of high importance (according to the search engine) then you will get more ranking points as opposed to a link from a page with lower authority.
3. Outbound links on the linking page - Ranking points given through a link are divided by the number of links on the page. It therefore goes without saying that if there are fewer links on the page then you get more points.
4. Age of the domain - The older the website, the more valuable the link becomes.
5. Relevancy of page - You will get more weighting if the page linking to your site is related to the keywords you are targeting. In the first point, our incoming link will be much better coming from a site about web design rather than one about pink elephants!.
6. Age of the link - The longer the link has been on a page, the more important it becomes.

There are many other factors that affect the strength of the incoming link so the article is well worth a read but these points above are certainly the most important factors.

posted by David Rhodes

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