Links, Why you need them

First of all what are links?


In its simplest form a link is an instruction for a browser to fetch information from an address.

Every time that an outside site has a link to your site that is construed by the search engines
as a vote for your site, so the more votes your site gets the higher it will be ranked.

Sounds simple so far, but the value of the vote is determined by

  • the ranking of the page sending the vote
  • the number of links sharing the value of the page sending the vote

    What this means in practice is that if your link is on a page with a ranking of 2 and there are 20 links on the page the value of the vote for your site is 0.1 so you would need at least 10 similar links to achieve an increase in your ranking. Of course it is not that simple as the search engines use very sophisticated algorithems to assess the value of each site.

    Type of link

    For ranking purposes there are 2 usefull types of link, an image link, where you make an image clickable, the important thing to remember is to use Your Keyword in the alt tag for the image

    The second type of link is a text link, where you should use the keyword in the anchor text. A common mistake is to make the anchor text something like "click here" which just wastes an opportunity to reinforce your position with the search engines.


    The very best type of linking you can get for your site is a one way link, which means that the link is coming from a site outside your site and you have not had to send a link back to them, which reduces the value of the link.

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