In Link Building Basics Part I, we covered the basic of link building and its role in search engine marketing. After reading that first blog, you should have a general understanding of hyperlinks, anchor tags, referral locations, anchor text, and link tag closures.
You should also know that link building is an integral part of Google crawlers recognizing your site and bringing it to the top of the search results. It’s important to note that it takes time to dramatically improve your website’s ranking in the search results, but smart linking, keyword usage and great content can help boost your site over time so it can eventually make its way to number one!
Today, we’ll cover the ways that search engines use links, of which there are two main ways. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo use links to discover new web pages and they use links to help them decide how high a page should rank on their results pages.
When we’re talking about discovering new web pages, we mean that search engines crawl through pages and index the page’s content. This extraction method gives crawlers the ability to determine if the page’s content is good enough to make rank based on relevant keywords.
But it’s not just the content of the page that the crawlers look at, they also look at how many links are pointing to the specific webpage from other sites (external websites) as well as the quality of those sites. If high-quality sites are linking to your page, then it’s more likely that your page will rank well than if lower quality pages were linking to your site. So external links can greatly increase your chances of ranking high in the search results, which is why they are such an important part of search engine marketing.
Now, onto ranking. Google is the top dog here, since its use of links as a ranking factor was a major page of Google’s domination of the search engine market nearly 25 years ago! PageRank, created by Google co-founder Larry Page, measured a page’s quality by the number of external links, which then became part of the ranking algorithm. In other words, external links pointing to a page became one of the major indicators of page quality.
Have questions about this or other search engine marketing practices? Contact the SEM experts at Liquori Co to learn how we can help your webpage dominate the search engine results in order to boost your business and increase your profits.
