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Achieving Organic Search Engine Ranking - Link Building
By Nick Yorchak (c) 2007

By now, we all know there's a lot that goes into achieving high
organic search engine rankings. In case you're unfamiliar with
the concept of "SEO," it refers to the art of modifying a web
site's properties in order for that site to appear in the top
search engine results on Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN, for
example.

Think of the search engine optimization (SEO)
(http://www.fusionbox.com/service/14/) process as a puzzle made
up of three distinct types of pieces: code, content, and last
but definitely not least, incoming links. You need to put all
the pieces together to see results; if you focus too much on
one single aspect of SEO, you'll have a third of the visibility
and you'll still be missing the rest of the pieces.

In this article, I'm going to talk specifically about link
building, and how this tactic is a critical component to
successful search engine optimization. For those unfamiliar with
this tactic, link building is the process by which you get
incoming links to a website. Link Building is initiated to get
incoming links to a website from other websites. The whole
purpose behind link building is to improve the link popularity
of a website, or to improve the number of incoming links to a
website.

The reason link building is so important to high organic
positioning is that all the major search engines use link
related variables in their ranking algorithms, the complex
equations that evaluate a site on a myriad of factors and then
use this data to determine which sites appear where on the
results pages.

So what incoming link related variables do the search engine
algorithms consider?

  - Number of Links

  - Quality/Origin of Links

  - Relevance of Links

  - Anchor Text Within Links

  - Links Must Present Value to Users

Confused? Let me explain. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask all
consider the number, quality, and relevance of incoming links to
your site when determining its rank (Incoming links are those
links that point to your web site). Google has a system called
PageRank, and the other engines operate within similar
frameworks. Google has stated, "PageRank relies on the uniquely
democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as
an indicator of an individual page's value." In essence, Google
interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A,
for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of
votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that
casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves
'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages
'important.'"

Thus, the sites with the most links, or votes, must naturally be
the best pages for the information being searched for. Think of
it as a digital form of never-ending natural selection; the
sites with the best content are linked to more often, boosting
their search engine positioning, which in turn, makes them more
visible to searchers who will continue linking to them more
often.

So, two sites that are both about web design are differentiated
by the number of incoming links they've obtained. If site A has
135 incoming links, and site B only has three, site A will
dominate site B in the search engine results. Yet not every link
helps. Click here to read about link building strategies to avoid
(http://www.fusionbox.com/journal/entry/where_not_to_acquire_links.html).

As you've read, links are an important aspect of SEO. But not
just any links. In fact, the wrong links can hurt you,
badly. At this point, I'll now turn my attention to the
quality and relevance of these links, in the process explaining
why not every link is a good one, and how some can do far more
harm than good.

As mentioned earlier, your links need to be from quality sites
that share some degree of relevancy with yours. The major
engines are all conscious of the origin of these links, and
lately, they've been known to penalize sites that build massive
networks of irrelevant links. This penalization stems from
something known as link farms, which were created in the late
1990s for SEO purposes. Link farms would sell links to sites,
but none of these links presented any real value to users. Now
the major engines evaluate a site not only on the number of
links, but the quality, relevance and origin of these links.
For example, a site supporting content about garages would be a
great linking opportunity for a auto parts site, while a cat
food site would most likely incur a penalty.

Lastly, the anchor text of your incoming links needs to be
optimized in order for the search engines to know what kind of
site this link directs a user to. Anchor text is the colored or
underlined text that indicates the existence of a link.

For example, if you own a Japanese sushi restaurant in Denver,
you don't want links that point to your site to say something
vague like "Denver restaurant." While this is true, it won't
help you get ranked for the keyphrase you want to be ranked for.

Instead, have your links' anchor text say "Japanese Cuisine and
Sushi Restaurant in Denver." Not only is this more specific and
better for users, it allows the search engines to better
determine the relationship between the content of your site and
the links that point to it. After all, the strength of this
relationship is surely one of the most important factors in
achieving high organic positioning. For a more detailed
explanation of link building and anchor text within links,
click here (http://www.fusionbox.com/pdf/
Fusionbox-Denver-Search-Engine-Marketing-for-SMB.pdf).

So now that you know what kind of links you need to acquire to
achieve high organic search positioning, where do you start?
Unfortunately, that's a topic for another blog, but if you
click here you can see how to acquire the links that
will make a difference (http://www.fusionbox.com/journal/entry/
web_marketing_2.0.html)

On a final note, remember to follow the philosophy of utility
when conducting any link building campaign: Present users with
links that connect them to useful, relevant information, and the
search engines will reward you with high organic rankings.
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Nick Yorchak is an SEO expert at Fusionbox
(http://www.fusionbox.com), a full-service Denver Internet
marketing (http://www.fusionbox.com/service/5/) company. He can
be reached at 303.952.7490. Click here to check out his expert
SEO blog (http://running-with-the-bulls-seo.blogspot.com/).
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