8. Introducing the concept of links in relation to web marketing

Critical to SEO success go out and get those links.

You need them.

Lots of them too.

Links on a web page enable the visitor to move around within and without a website easily. At least it should be easy and logical from your visitors point of view.

Search engines are critical to web marketing success as we know. It is believed that 50% of any websites visitors will probably arrive at the site or page from a direct search query. By this I mean if a searcher types in good cheddar cheese he will be taken directly to a page about good cheddar cheese. On the other hand the searcher may have come from a link elsewhere maybe the searcher had been looking at a completely different site about English cheeses and saw a link to the site about good cheddar cheese.

When I review my own websites logs I find that about 50% of all page views come from search engines directly, 30% from links outside my site, about 20% from bookmarks and other means.

Assuming these results are typical then by focusing solely upon keyword usage to drive traffic to your site will limit the amount of traffic to your site. It is obvious that to maximize traffic a strategy of getting links to your web pages/websites must be incorporated into your web marketing work.

It just so happens that this is how the search engines also think. Indeed their thinking appears to be leaning towards the quality web page linking approach for determining high rankings.

Incoming links to a website, using the words of Google developers Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page indicate relevance and to a lesser degree quality of the web page. PageRank on the other hand indicates the popularity of a web page. Googles main aim has always been to deliver quality results and has used popularity as a means of identifying this.

These two concepts are very important in our attempts to rank highly on a SERP.

In general on-page factors have an unknown but finite limit to their ranking value in terms of SERPs whilst PageRank does not. For this reason the best optimized page in the world will generally lose out to a high PageRank page with only basic attempts at optimization for keyword use. This we know from reading the research paper published by Brin and Page in 1998.

We will leave PageRank until later and just discuss anchor links and anchor links text for the time being. Just bear in mind PageRanks critical importance especially for highly competitive searches as you read on. PageRank is a trade mark term of Google.

8.1 PICTURES OF LINKS:

There is a lovely piece of software which is possibly of limited use but it does provide a great way to view and understand links. That software is from a company called TouchGraph. Take a look at the pictures below:

The top left picture on the above screen shot is shown below:

The above is a pictorial representation of the links to and from a well known USA communication companys site.

The next one is from a site called wasted youth

The two pictures are very different and serve to illustrate how complex and varied websites and their linking structures can be.

These pictures were generated by Touch Graph using Googles related search query. The pictures show the way the top 9 related sites link to the chosen URL. Lets take a closer look at what this software can tell us.

In the graph following I have selected a site we will call site 5 (not one of mine) which shows a degree of interlinking from what are probably independent sites and also dependent sites. By dependent sites I mean belonging to the same owner as site 5. Because they have a common owner the linking can be arranged any way the owner chooses.

It would normally be very difficult to get an outsider to provide link structures similar to what you see on the right hand side of this graph.

Note that 5 of the top 9 related websites link back to site number 5 without any degree of interlinking between them. Note that site 5 also has links in from 4 other websites that are also intimately linked together. I would hazard a guess that these interlinked sites have a very close relationship to site 5.

There is nothing wrong with this since each site I presume would have good content and be able to withstand close human inspection on the other hand they could be used purely for spamming reasons. For good content sites this degree of interlinking is a perfectly acceptable way of improving link popularity.

Always remember on the other hand it is a way of exploiting knowledge of how search engines work and opens up a way of spamming search engines using what are called doorway pages and the like.

Lets take a quick look at another site which belongs to one of my competitors.

Each point above is abbreviated for claritys sake on the pictures but the software actually provides the exact URL for each point.

Remember I am competing with this company. I now immediately know which sites were providing good links to this competitor from this picture. I would then consider trying to obtain links from these same companies myself. Do you see an immediate application?

I also know at a glance which sites are linking to my competitor and which are probably belonging to the competitor. This fact I would not be able to distinguish easily by looking at URLs .. of course I would avoid contacting these sites in looking for links so as not to alert my competitor of my presence and intentions..

Now if we ask the software to take us out a little further this is what we see:

This graph provides a view of who is linking to whom one step out from the competitors site itself. The linking together of related content sites is what makes a website popular and relevant in terms of search engine algorithms. This software allows us to analyze to our hearts content and in a very interesting way which links are probably worth seeking and also which ones to avoid seeking.

Use this website to explore and discover the world of links. Check out your own websites and those of your competitors.

8.2 LINKS AND ANCHOR TEXT

What is anchor text. Take a look at this simple demo web page created in Front Page.

The underlined blue text above is called anchor text. You see such text links on nearly all web pages

This is how the HTML code looks to create the above page I have highlighted the anchor text in red. The link text is highlighted in blue.

<body>

<p>Our Demo web page</p>

<p><a href="http://www.practical-water-gardens.com/">Focus supply the world's

best water features</a></p>

<p>&nbsp;</p>

</body>

</html>

Google differentiated itself from most search engines when it was first introduced by taking into account not only links text and anchor link text on the web page itself but also anchor text and links text on incoming links to that web page. This approach needed a great deal of computer processing power bearing in mind the vast number of links compared to web pages.

Just take another look at only one of the above Touch Graphs and then know there are more than 8 billion sites on Googles database ..

Absolutely staggering and amazing or at least I think so.

Google knows for every link the source web page and the destination web page and it records these data for use in SERPs information.

There was a distinct advantage however in taking specific notice of the backward link in so much that the link back to a web page was often not under the control of the web pages designer. On this basis alone it was more difficult for a designer to manipulate the SERPs results. As time proceeded however it became possible to spam this backward link system in many ways and the power that PageRank held has to some extent at least been negated by the spam techniques used.

Despite the spam the concept of back-linking to your website remains an absolute key to high rankings. Getting lots of links is far more important than on-page optimization.

Google by virtue of its unique ability to collect and analyze anchor link text and proximity of text together with its other full text capabilities however was able to identify such unfriendly behavior and penalize offending pages. This attempt by Google specifically to identify inappropriate linking structures continues at a fast rate and many websites that have occupied high ranking positions have been removed from the SERPs on the basis of this inappropriate (according to Google) engineering of link structures.

A bit later well talk about blogs in terms of SEO these are used by those in the know quite legitimately to create many, and relevant links thereby increasing the link popularity and link relevance factors in ranking terms. As many of you may know most blogs invite comments and this became a wonderful game played by spammers until a new system was introduced to make comment spam irrelevant. Let me explain

If a determined spammer wanted to he could access hundreds, thousands even of blogs every day. He could make a comment like nice site Joes corner store . Of course in each comment would be a link back to Joes corner store. This way a massive back link structure could be created that had zero benefit to the search engines or search community.

Google and all the other major search engines overcame this problem by discounting blog comments to zero. In other words commenting was of course still allowed but the comments would be totally disregarded by the search engines in terms of back link counting.

They did this by introducing what is known as the nofollow tag attribute. This tag identified to a search spider that any link with such a tag inside it should be ignored. Heres how the above link would look with the nofollow tag incorporated

<a rel=nofollow href="http://www.practical-water-gardens.com/">Focus supply the world's

best water features</a>

This tag introduction, probably unknowingly, provided webmasters and SEOers with a wonderful way to engineer PageRank as well see later.

To summarize You need to get as many back links to your important web pages as you possibly can but stay away from the spam, get rich quick ways.

8.3 BUILDING WORDS INTO LINKS ON YOUR WEBSITE

When a visitor arrives at a website, hopefully yours, the challenge is to keep the visitor there by providing valuable or useful information. This is very difficult. It can be accomplished by web page layout and by providing an easy and meaningful way to get to the next part of the websites story through a well located, descriptive text link.

You may have noticed that the more savvy websites are abandoning button type links for the simple reason they cannot accommodate much text and also they add to download time (the buttons are pictures) and they dont work for SEO.

The worst kind of buttons are those that say Next, Back, Home etc since they do not encourage any visitor to explore. If instead of Next the link said click here for a free offer chances are that the link would be clicked upon and that little bit of extra time would be available to convince your visitor of the value of your site.

If instead of Home it said start page; subscribe to our free gardening newsletter then also the visitor would at least know what could be accomplished at the home page.

8.4 THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF ANCHOR LINK TEXT TO GOOGLE SUCCESS

This is a very appropriate time to introduce Sergey Brins and Lawrence Pages pioneering search engine work to you. If you believe you really want to make a difference to search engine success the following paper presented by these two young men at the 7th world wide web conference in 1998 is a must read. Today these men are billionaires.

As I write this section in July 2005 the share price of Google has just reached $300. Google is now the worlds biggest media company after only 7 years. Bigger even than Time-Warner

At the time of the initial Google research publication being presented Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page were PhD students at Stanford University. They had built a prototype search engine based upon some 24 million web pages which they called Google (after a mathematical entity called a googol which represented the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.).

Brin and Page were acutely aware that the major search engines at that time did not always return quality results and that the commercial world manipulated the SERPs to suit advertisers.

The two young men based their new search engine upon what they called citations which had been the essence of academic success through the years. A citation was essentially a reference to a published academic paper. The more citations that an academic collected the more valuable was that work judged.

The equivalent on the web was the collection of backward links argued Brin and Page. As such a very important part of the algorithm developed was based upon backward links and later the text associated with each backward link.

The immediate problem they faced was that for every web page there was about 7 backward links thereby creating the need for more and more computer resources. Within the Google engine they developed means for parsing and storing all the words from every web page and for storing the complete HTML of every page. They were able to separate words into these groups:

• Words in the URL

• Words in the anchor link text on page and also from other web pages

• Words in the Title

• Words in bold

• Words capitalized

• Words in the main body text

Amongst others

In addition they were able to record how close each word was to every other word (they called this proximity) and also to relate each link to the source web page and the destination web page this was the information they used to calculate PageRank which we will leave to later.

They created word lists which they called Hits. They divided these Hits into fancy Hits and plain Hits.

Fancy hits were search words contained in TITLES and LINKS. These Hits were kept in what were called short barrels. All other Hits were kept in long barrels. These are the actual terms used by Brin and Page in their groundbreaking paper referred to.

What all this meant in practice was that in response to a search query the short barrels were searched first. If sufficient results were returned to match the query limit set by Google the long barrels were not even looked at since it was deemed that the more relevant web pages had already been found (by searching for TITLE and LINK words only). Now here lies the reason to making sure your keyword is in the TITLE and in any LINK.

The following description is a very short paraphrase of the full paper of course. Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page published the following table of how they carried out searches based upon a searcher typing in a query. In response to the query search Google would:

1. Parse the query.

2. Convert words into wordIDs.

3. Seek to the start of the doclist in the short barrel for every word.

4. Scan through the doclists until there is a document that matches all the search terms.

5. Compute the rank of that document for the query.

6. If we are in the short barrels and at the end of any doclist, seek to the start of the doclist in the full barrel for every word and go to step 4.

7. If we are not at the end of any doclist go to step 4.

8. Sort the documents that have matched by rank and return the top k.

Source is above paper reference Figure 4. Google Query Evaluation

Note from the table that when all the query searching has been done only the top k (top 1,000) SERPs are returned. Note also that each return is ranked (item 5 above) for that query.

The paper discusses how the ranking process is carried out in broad terms. The following is my interpretation of this broad description please bear this in mind and that I could be wrong.

There is not much doubt in my mind that Google takes the following parameters into account for their ranking algorithm and there is little doubt a limit is placed upon on-page factors like these (the paper clearly states this to be the case just as clearly as it stated that the terms below were all considered)

Every Hit list contained the following information:

• Every word

• Plain text large font

• Plain text small font

• Plain text bold font

• Capitalization information

• Word proximity or position in document

• It differentiated between same word in Title, anchor text or URL

• And others

Google allocated a weight to reach type of Hit and counted the frequency of each Hit of each type. My table below is a bit of pure conjecture but serves to highlight what I believe I understand from reading the research paper. Take note that weights are numbers I have allocated purely for illustration purposes.

Assume the search query word is garden.

Google counts every Hit of the query word garden in the following (and more of course) parameters.

Dotprod is the product of weight x frequency and is used only because the Brin, Page paper refers to the term as dotprod

If my assumptions are right and using these purely fictitious numbers once a total of 388 is reached it would not matter how many more instances of the Hit were recorded. It would not influence the on-page score because the MAXIMUM set by Googles algorithm had been reached at 388. This is why the point was made earlier that only so much optimization can be achieved by reference to on-page factors alone.

Without going into detail about PageRank but for the sake of completion the above total of 255 scoring points is modified by multiplying the 255 total by the actual PageRank (scoring points are my terms) to get the final rank mark as used by Google in arranging its SERPs.

For the sake of clarity lets assume that this web page had a PageRank of 1,000 then the total score for ranking purposes would be 255,000.

Lets assume that a competitive web page scored 139 points for similar on-page factors but had a PageRank of 2,000 then this latter web page would be ranked higher than the first one since it would have a total rank of 2,000 x 139 = 278,000.

If PageRank of another competing web page was 10,000 then the single presence of the word garden in TITLE and nowhere else would mean the total score would be 1,000,000 (100 x 10,000) and would rank above both the other examples.

If the PageRank of a competing page was close to 0 (in fact lets assume Zero although zero PageRank is actually impossible) then no matter if on-page score was 388 the total score would be Zero this is how Google can punish spammers.

8.5 GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF USING ANCHOR TEXT IN LINKS:

> Most surfers look to top of page and left hand side of page for most important links and especially Home Page.

> No harm is done using bold text for links. It is possible it would help if related to the keyword. Remember Google knows if you have used a bold keyword. To you and me bold signifies more important.

> Most people expect links to be blue underlined but they can be other colors of course. My advice here is simple always use blue underlined links and especially so in body text.

> A link is still a link if the underlining is removed. Many websites are using css now to create links that are of a different color rather than use underline. Makes no sense to me but it can look nice.

> If you have a web page for which the keyword is garden and you have put effort into optimizing the on-page factors such as including garden in the Title and the word garden being well distributed in the body text and on page links then it is very important that on other web pages on your site that links back to this page include the word garden. If your keyword was water gardening then the whole phrase should be included in the link text pointing back to this page.

> This is how Google knows that the web page referred to is relevant to water gardening. It may not be high quality (as judged by PageRank) but is relevant to the query.

> I belong to the school that believes rightly or wrongly that the keyword in the URL is a good thing. This means I consider http://www.pond-pumps.com is a better name for an URL than http://www.pondpumps.com . Google does not take hyphens into account. It reads pond-pumps as pond pumps. Of course Google can parse the long word pondpumps to identify the two different keywords.

> In encouraging others to link back to your web page always remember to attempt to get them to use your own words which would of course would include the keyword. Most people would go along with your request.

> In arranging links take note that the following URLs are all technically different so standardize on what you prefer they all work the same way but search engines may well see them as different URLs and using a mixture could have a serious impact upon your PageRank.

http://www.pondpumps.com

.http://www.pondpumps.com/

http://pondpumps.com

http://pondpumps.com/

http://www.pondpumps.com/index.html

> It is probable that the following approach where the link has appropriate normal text containing the keyword in close proximity to the actual text which also included the keyword is better than a plain link. This is typical of a normal citation and is another way of rewarding well-designed web pages and an approach that makes spamming even more difficult. This is the type of link information also provided by most good directories and many directories are manually checked and arranged.

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