Sep 28, 2008 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Inbound Links are Just as Important as Content

If you’ve been around the Internet for any length of time you’ve probably heard the expression, “On the Internet, content is king and the keywords are the queens.”

This came about because the search engines love new content and many people believe that the only way that search engines can tell what a site is about is by analyzing a website’s pages for the keywords. All true to be sure. However…

Not as many people know the biggest factor that the search engines consider when ranking a site. These are the in-bound links. Using Google as an example, all other things being equal a website with a large number of other websites linking to it will rank higher than one with fewer or no in-bound links. This makes sense because Google views each link as a vote of trust by the other website owner.

Afterall, you wouldn’t want to send your visitors to another site that had no value, right?

The key to using this information is to get as many in-bound links to your site as possible. But here is the secret – make sure that those links contain the keywords you wish to get a high ranking for right in the hyper-link. For example, if you want a good ranking for ‘dog toys’ make sure that you in-bound links contain the keyword phrase “dog toys” in the actual hyper-link. Don’t include a link back to your site that says something like – for great information about dog toys, click here. Why not? Because Google will see this and think your site is about “click here”.

In other words, Google can rank a site for a keyword that has nothing to do with the keyword.

Don’t believe me? Ok, go to Google right now and do a search on ‘click here’. Normally, the number one ranked page out of over 1 billion results is Adobe.com but I bet that you won’t find the keywords ‘click here’ anywhere on their page. That means that when people are linking to Adobe.com they are saying something like, “To get the latest Adobe Reader click here.”

To summarize, get as many in-bound links as you can (do this by exchanging links and writing and submitting press release, articles, etc.) but make sure that you have your keywords in the hyperlink. You’ll be miles ahead of your competitors and your ranking will soar, provided you’re not in an overly competitive industry.