Search Engine Optimization

How much weight do links have?

 You can find part 1 of FAQs over here.

Link building is one of the most important elements of SEO. Here is what Google has to say about links:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Search engines rely on links to determine relevancy of websites. If a site on mortgages has a high number of links from websites on mortgages, search engines will consider it important and give it good visibility.

There are other, off page link factors that search engines take into consideration. For Example:

• Anchor text (a word or a phrase containing the actual link). If a limousine service website gets a link from another highly important limousine website and that link has a keyword in it, search engines will give a lot of weight to thank link. For example:“You can find limousines here” is better than “You can find limousines here”

Search engines also consider text close to the link.

Links increase the overall visibility of a website. If two exact website were taken and website A had 20 links, while website B had 500 links, website B would beat website A for almost every keyword.

How does link building work.

There is a number of link building techniques.

Asking for a link. Involves emailing the site of interest and requesting to be linked. One of the hardest SEO tasks since it involves deep research into vast amounts of websites. Manual requests, submissions and exchanges – most effective long term link building strategies.

Directory Submission. A number of directories offer free submissions as well as pay for submissions, with specified anchor text(link text) and description. The example would be Yahoo!, Business.com.

Link Bait. Link bait is described as the content, so useful in its nature that people voluntarily link to it. Link bait can be anything. One of the most popular baits is written content. Offering very valuable article usually gets people linking without requests, creating natural, automatic link building opportunity.

Does correct HTML markup has any impact?

It is said that splitting presentational code(CSS) from content(HTML) helps to increase search engine rankings. We need to remember that search engines designed their spiders before CSS standards. Spiders were meant to punch through numerous tables and this stays true to this day.

Search engines will not genereally have any problems if an article is inside the table, but it is best to stay away from too many nested tables (one inside the other). By separating data from design with HTML/CSS code, optimizers can communicate with spiders more efficiently.

Does Meta information matter? (Meta Keywords, Meta Description)

Meta Keywords (code within the page containing keywords) do not play any role in the ranking process since it is too easy to manipulate it. Practical use for meta keywords tag is to include misspellings of the most commonly used keywords.

Meta description (code within the page containing short description of the page) has much more weight. It does not affect rankings, but is used for presentational purposes. Short description beneath the link on search results is usually pulled from “meta description”.
If there is no meta description, search engines will pull random snippets from the website, which may not as compelling to your target audience as a swift and informative call to action.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Term Black Hat SEO refers to manipulation of search engines in an effort to get high search engine rankings. The practice may involve: link farms, cloaking, keyword stuffing, spam indexing, interlinking and more. Black Hat is also referred to as spam. Search engines do not tolerate any manipulation. If a website is found to be using banned methods, in most cases, it gets permanently banned from search results. Some advanced “Black Hatters” may manage to get the website up on top, however search engines spend million of dollars keeping their results clean and spam free. Such websites get quickly caught and banned.

The only path to long term search success is through proven, approved methods. Learn more about SEO at SEO Book.