Search engine optimization and links

Not too long ago I explained the whats of SEO in my post what is search engine optimization? Now let’s start on some search engine optimization basics: links and link building.

SEO and links

Links are the oil that grease that skids of the Google beast. For the truly search engine optimization inept and complete internet newbies, a link (or more accurately a hyperlink) is a segment of text that will take you to another page.

So earlier when I linked back to my older seo introduction post, that was a link.The html code is <a href=”website address here”>keyword text here</a>.

Links and search engines

OK, I’m finished my newbie hand holding introduction. Now for the search engines. Search engines LOVE links. Think of the google search results as a popularity contest.

Now think of each link as a vote. So everytime you get a link to your website, you just became more popular. The search engines rank you in terms of popularity. So more links = more votes = more popular = higher search engine rankings.

*Note: Upon re-reading this article I wanted to clarify something…I used the word popular just for the metaphor. The number of people using the site (ie. the actual popularity of the site) has NOTHING to do with how important the search engines think it is. It doesn’t matter how many readers or members a site has, if it doesn’t have links, search engines don’t consider it important.

Now, this metaphor gets a lot more complex, but we’ll abandon the popularity contest allegory in case anyone had a bad highschool experience…

Search engine rankings and links

So more links to your page tells the search engines that you have some importance on the web. Great. But how does the search engine determine what you should get ranked for?

Well remember that every link has anchor text. So the link tells the search engine that you’re important. The anchor text in the link tells the search engine what kind of search result you’re important for.

You’ll routinely notice me link back to my home page under different keywords, this time I’m going to tell Google that my website is about search engine optimization strategies and that searchers looking for seo strategies would be well served by me.

What I’ve done here is use one of my subpages to link to my homepage, thereby increasing the liklihood that I get my home page showing up in the search engine rankings for seo-related keywords.

Now look at the start of this post. I did that again there didn’t I? What I’m trying to do is show Google (or any search engine robot–I try not to discriminate) that my website is relevent to search engine optimization. If I only linked back to my homepage, it wouldn’t be as useful.

By showing that multiple pages of the site are relevant for this keyword, I’m helping Google realize that my entire site should be ranked for my keywords, not just my front page.

The power of links

Right now, your head should be spinning as you try to grasp the intricacies of a search engine’s algorithm, the role of hyperlinks and try to deal with the horribly painful popularity contests of high school.

The alternative is that you’re already versed in SEO and your mind is already working over the methods in which Google can be gamed.

We’ve stated that the keyword of a link helps you gain importance for that particular keyword (it also helps you gain importance for related keywords, but that’s for another day). It stands to reason then, if I really want to rank well for search engine optimization, that I should just get a whole lot of links to my site with SEO related keywords in the anchor text.

Getting backlinks

Let me back up for a second and talk about actually getting our links (also called backlinks). So I’ve showed you that you can link to your own posts to help increase rankings, but think about that–you’re basically voting for yourself. It works only to a certain extent if you catch my drift.

Before your own vote means anything, you have to become important. You become important by getting links from other, already important people. Now there are a few options here:

1) The 100% whole-grain, organic, natural method of writing amazing, unique and entertaining content and hoping someone finds your site and links to you. Even if they do link to you, you’re probably not getting the keyword you wanted anyways, so this way is kind of a bust…

2) The synthetic, processed internet marketing method of going out and building backlinks to your site yourself. This will let you control the keyword text and the context of the link (I’ll talk about this later), so its a strong option.

Think about it what do you end up eating in your everyday life?  #1(organic & natural) or #2 (Synthetic and processed)? So we’re going to synthetically create links ourselves, telling Google that we’re important.

Now the important thing here is that we’re using venues that are not related to our site. That means we’re finding sites that are already important and using them to link for us and make us important.

This is the holy grail of search engine optimization and will take up most of your time.

How do we get backlinks and where do we find them? Well that’s all for another day, partly because its so huge in itself and partly because a lot of my methods are top secret and I’m not sure I want to give them up.

To recap: to make my site rank for search engine optimization, I need to get a bunch of backlinks from already important sites to my site with SEO as the anchor text.

So search engine rankings depend on links?

Now you’re catching on. The problem is that once upon a time, swarms of other people figured this out and started to massively link to each other using keywords in order to game the search engine rankings (called Google bombing).

The famous example is where tons of people linked to George Bush’s biography using the keyword “miserable failure” so that the first result on google for miserable failure was good old G.W. Now Google had to modify the effect of the google bomb, so they made it harder for us to game the search engines.

G now notices when all of your incoming links have the exact same keywords. If you think about it, its pretty obvious–you have no control over who links to you and what anchor text they use, so if all 300 links coming to your site have the keyword “search engine optimization” we can safely guess that those aren’t organic links.

Remember how I made the food metaphor for the 2 types of links? Organic being all natural and synthetic being something we made. Well it turns out organic food is good for you.

That is, Google now recognizes what kind of links you’re getting. If they all look manipulated (ie. like you’re trying to Google bomb) you’ll get a google slap instead. Now, to rank well, we’re going to need organic links and man made links.

Making links look organic

If you look at a site, you might see a mass of links on the side of the website to other sites with a bunch of keywords stuck in there. These are the old school “miserable failure” links that used to work really really well. Now Google knows that those things are synthetic, and penalizes webmasters for trying to game the search engine.

Instead, you’ve got to get creative and make it look like you’ve written a lovely and useful post and put you’re link inside of a post.

Let me show you one great way of getting links. I’ve decided to befriend Justin, who owns the site SEO Zombie. Now Justin is trying to get ranked for the keyword seo, so I’m going to help him out (take note here: if you want to make a friend, give him a cookie first). Instead of giving him a useless blogroll link, I’m going to link to him in the middle of this massive epic of a post right in the middle of a sentence.

Well first I scrolled through his site a bit until I found a post of his that would be of great benefit. Justin released a great seo wordpress theme that you can use for free. You might be asking why I didn’t just link to his homepage? Well it looks much more organic if I link to a post he wrote as opposed to his main page.

Once I convince Google that Justin’s seo word press theme is important, Google will natural start to realize the rest of his site is important and he will gain Google rankings for his keywords.

But now what? I could have just given away a free link–perfectly organic and yet perfectly optimized–which is the perfect link to Justin and I could get nothing back. True but blogs notify other blogs of linking to each other, so Justin will get a “pingback” notifying him that I sent him a link.

Since he’s got a small blog, my money is on him noticing the pingback and reading this post to see how he scored a link. He’ll of course be intrigued that the link is perfectly optimized and totally planned and he’ll probably read the entire post. In fact, he’s probably reading this sentence right now. Yes Justin, I’m talking to you.

OK, so I’ve showed you a great way to make friends online. I’m sure that Justin will contact me either through email or comment and thank me for the link and since we’re in the same niche, we’ll be in a great position to trade future organic links with each other.

Think about how nutty this is guys–I’ve just created a mammoth 1500+ word post to lure Justin into my blog. Now the upswing is that he’s bound to notice it and there is a huge amount to gain if the two us keep organically linking to each other. Once you find someone in your niche worth linking to, you can make your own e-friend. If the two of you get along, that’s a whole lot of perfect backlinks. Plus now you two can lure in other bloggers. Creating your own niche network is a great way to get yourselves ranked.

I actually have more to say about what I’ve just done here, but I’m not trying to creep Justin out, so let’s add it to the list of posts that have yet to be done.

Advanced baclinks and search engine optimization

I have just covered the absolute newbie’s guide to backlinks and search engines. I intentionally left some gaps that will be covered later including: pagerank and links, google juice and backlinks, nofollowing links, authority, passing authority and the list goes on. For now, let’s get a hang of the basic search engine optimization techniques and work our way up to advanced SEO.

- MJ