Netalot

How do links work? In a nutshell if you have a direct link to your site via a highly respected and high PageRank site such as the New York Times, Nasa, Google, Adobe or Microsoft for instance your site is a very important site.

Or that is how Google evaluates it. It’s along the same principle as some people who attach themselves to celebrities. They think by being associated with famous people, they will get famous themselves eventually. Of course, as you know, this doesn’t quite work as well as they think. But then that’s because the link isn’t that strong.

The same applies to your blog. If you do not have strong links to you then you have no credibility according to Google. How does Google rank your site or blog then? Google determines your importance by the power of the links to your site.

Google’s PageRank is on a logarithmic scale. This means that a PageRank of 4 is 10 times stronger than PageRank 3, and PR5 is 100 times stronger than PR3. That means that hundreds of PR0 links to your blog or site mean absolutely nothing. But just one PR6 will move you into the stratosphere.

Besides the importance of the PageRank, the other major important factor to consider is topicality. Are the links coming back to your site in any way topically related? If they are not related then the search engines will put a question mark against your legitimacy.

Your blog is about pet care, but your links back to you are about insurance. You have a site dealing with stamp collection but your links are all about car maintenance. It could very well be that you are part of a link farm or are buying links yourself. It doesn’t look natural.

And as a third consideration the anchor text which is the underlined blue text in the link, needs to be variations of the keywords that you want to rank for. You don’t want all your inbound links to have the same anchor text because that looks suspicious.

Links that are generated because you are posting good content make a difference. People then want to link back to you. These links coming in will grow naturally over a period of time. However, if you suddenly get a thousand or so links overnight all with the same anchor text you might just be considered a spammer.

Here are some ways to get natural links that are worth having. Check the keywords you wish to rank on and see who is already ahead of the pack by being on the front pages of Google search. See how you can associate with these sites. You might leave a comment or submit a guest post to them. Post good content on your site and they might want to associate with you.

Write a free ebook about your topic. Something that has valuable information in it and give it away. Create interviews with important people within your niche. In other words start being visible and get your name and blog out as an expert in your field. People will want to be with you if you are seen to be important.

There are many ways to create natural search engine optimisation. They all involve a fair amount of work. But it’s worth putting in the effort rather than trying the short cut route by buying in links. Keep the reputation of your site or blog clean.