Secrets of successful websites

Links


Links (inbound links, anyway) compete with keywords for the title of most important tool in the optimisation box.

Google started life using links as its way of differentiating itself from its rivals.  The original PageRank was a measure of the popularity of a page as "voted" by all the other sites on the world wide web.  Larry Page (after whom PageRank is named – ironically it is not named eponymously) argued that pages in SERPs should be ordered according to the votes it had attracted from other sites.  These votes should be measured by the number and quality of the links to each site made by all the other sites on the web.  It was the use of this that propelled Google to its present position in the world.

Links are mostly formed by what is called anchor text.   The best example of anchor text is the use of the expression "click here" on web pages to supply a link to another page on the site or on another site.  The fact that "click here" is the best-known example of the genre shows little optimisation intelligence because Google stores great value by them and the anchor text itself therefore should be the main keyword of the page being linked to. Not only do we have a link (excellent) but the link uses the page’s main keyword (excellent for the second time for one piece of optimisation).  

That fact that anchor text is one of the best ways to supply Google points through links is clearly illustrated by the following example.

Do a Google search on "click here" and what comes up top of the list?  Adobe Acrobat Reader.  Examine the page – indeed the whole site – and you’re hard pushed to find the expression "click here" anywhere, never mind in keyword position.  Why then does this page of this site rank at the top of SERPs when over one billion results for the search term are reported?  

The answer is simple and lies in the number of sites on the world wide web who require a visitor to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed in order to read the pdf file they want to download.  They do this by using words on their web page(s)  such as "You require Adobe Acrobat Reader to read this file.  If you don’t have it click here. The last two words contain a link the Adobe Arcrobat Reader site and if you click the link that’s the site that will open.  There are so many sites around the world with that link – click here – that no other optimisation is needed to get the site to the top of SERPs against the competition of over one billion other sites.  

There is no better example of the importance of links.  Our courses and downloads go into the subject in much more detail.
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