Off-page linking, also known as 'back links', is very important and some folks say it's the most critical factor in obtaining good rankings in the search engines. Off-page links / back links are links which are located on another web-site and which link back to your web site. Back links also play a role for your site popularity and your Pagerank.
Before we talk in detail about back links, let's have a quick explanation of 'Pagerank'. Pagerank is Google's patented method for measuring the importance of a web page on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 is the highest. The PageRank algorithm analyzes the quality and quantity of links that point to a page.
The most important factor in off page linking is the anchor text. Anchor text are the words that you click to activate and follow a hyperlink to another web page or to another web site. It is the text people see when they click a link and it is the description of the link itself.
It is crucial to properly link your website using the keywords and key phrases that you want your site to rank for. It's also important to vary your off page linking and not to use the exact same phrase each time. Instead use a few different phrases but make sure they are the ones you want to rank for in the search engine results. Your back linking strategies will help to build up your Page Reputation.
Page reputation is what other sites say about you using anchor text. You can use this site - www.marketleap.com to check your site's link popularity, but more importantly you can use it to check out your competition and see how many other sites are linking to them. When you find out how many, learn what anchor text they are using and increase your own back links using the correct anchor text.
Now let's talk a little about on-page linking, also known as 'internal linking'. On-page linking and internal linking refers to links on your own website that link to other pages of the same website. There's not a lot to say about internal linking but it's worth noting that when you link to your internal pages, you should link using your keywords or key phrases. This will help to increase your keyword density and to provide your internal pages with more relevant links.
For example, if the main keyword you are trying to rank for is 'computer software', your internal links should use that phrase. So instead of simply using standard link text such as: contact us, links, about us, and so on, it's usually better to add your keywords into the link anchor text like this: contact the computer software experts, about computer software, computer software links page, etc. This won't have any influence on your link popularity, but it will certainly help to pass on page reputation to your internal pages.
Now a word about back-links, also known as incoming links. Can back links hurt your website? I have discussed about this with experts and the consensus is: No they can't. The reasoning is quite easy to figure. If they did hurt your web site, your competitors would be linking to your sites from every bad site out there and using trashy phrases to hurt your website. Then it would not take long before the search engine results were so poor that nobody would use the search engines any longer!
The advice I do have about links is: Don't link out to web sites that have been banned from the search engines or that use tactics that are against the search engine's terms of service. I would also avoid all "link farms". Link farms are web pages which have been specifically set up with thousands of links. These sites can hurt your rankings.
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