Free Search Engine Optimization Tips

“…and you are…the weakest link!”

The old saying is true, “A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link”. To some extent this holds true in the world of search engine optimization and your website linking strategy. Links within and without your site all play a role in how well your site ranks within the search engines. Not only in your internal links within the site, but your outbound links and most importantly, your inbound links from other websites.

The rules have changed from the days of old where things like “reciprocal linking” and sites that just have hundreds of out bound links to web sites (otherwise known as link farms), are gone and hold no weight with the search engines. As a matter of fact, you can actually be penalized if a link to your website is found on one of the sites that just post links to other web sites, either with no relevance or content related to the keywords being searched on. The search engines view these as spamming techniques, and in the end will hurt you more than help you. My advice to you, stay far away as possible from anything that even looks like or smells like a link farm or anything of that nature. What follows in the next paragraph is what you are looking for.

The major key to helping you achieve great organic search engine results is “inbound linking” or one way links. This is where a link from another site has an inbound link on their website linking back to your home page or sub page within your site without you required to post a link back to their site. Not as easy to achieve as reciprocal linking but well worth the effort. Even beyond a one way link from another site is another factor equally as important.

That factor is that even if you have 100 or 1000 inbound links to your site, if those site either have a low or no page rank (page rank is a rating from 0 to 10 as to the quality and quantity of your site….in simplest terms, even though there is a lot more to page ranking than the aforementioned…we’ll save that one for a future tip). The higher the page rank of the site that your inbound links are coming from, the more weight that is given to your site. The idea here is, in the eyes of the search engines, is that if these site are linking to you and your not required to link back to them, then your site must have some quality information on it that is worth linking to. Also, the more inbound links that you have from higher page rank site, the better off you are going to rank.

Now achieving these inbound links from high page rank sites is the focal point of achievement. It is an effort that takes time and energy on your part to gradually work there. There are many great tools and plug ins etc. available to help you on this quest, one that will follow in a future post or perhaps in a webinar (I will let you know). I will also be adding some links to some of the fantastic resources available out there that I have accumulated over the years that I use within my own SEO research, so check back often . Until the next post, happy SEO-ing