If you’re trying to get your own website to rank high in the search engines for your chosen keywords, you need to optimise the content on your site to pull in that search engine traffic. That’s referred to as on-page optimisation, which we’ll talk about in an upcoming article. However, the other part of increasing your rankings is off-page optimisation, which refers to how many back-links there are pointing to your sites.
You see, Google and some of the other search engine engineers quickly realized that they couldn’t simply analyse a web page’s content to determine where the page should appear in the search engines. That’s because webmasters started gaming the system. They stuffed their pages with keywords. Sometimes they even used keywords that didn’t have much to do with the topic or content on the actual site. And sometimes even though the keywords were relevant, the content itself was low quality.
Search engine companies lose business when they repeatedly return low-quality results to people who are using their services. That’s why these companies soon started using outside factors – namely, links – to help rank sites.
For example, Google has a factor it calls Page Rank (PR), which is basically a measure of how many other sites link to it. You can think of these links as “votes” for a site. So the more votes a site has, the better chance the site has of being able to rank well for a chosen set of keywords.
However, not all back-links or “votes” are created equal. Here are some of the factors that are thought to be most valuable when getting links:
- Get one-way incoming back-links rather than reciprocal links.
- Get links from well-established authority sites, such as those with a high page rank.
- Get links from pages that don’t have a lot of other outgoing links.
- Get links from relevant sites (e.g., those that are related to your niche).
- Include your keywords in your anchor text. That is, the clickable part of the link that points back to your site should be made up of the keywords you’re trying to rank for. So if you’re trying to rank your web page for “dog training secrets,” then get back-links that use those three words as the anchor text.
While there are plenty of ways to get back-links, one way to do it is by posting your content on relevant, high PR sites in your niche. Just submitting your content to article directories helps you get back-links. However, if bloggers and others in your niche pick up your article and re-publish it, then you’ll have links coming in from relevant niche sites. Indeed, you may be able to get dozens or more quality links using this strategy!
For earlier articles in my Article Marketing introductory series you can click here, here, here and here.
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