The periodic table of SEO success factors part 11, link building

In these series of articles, I explained already four columns of the “elements” of the periodic table of SEO success factors. In this article, I will explain the fifth column which is link building.

Links are one of the main “off-page” ranking factors used by search engines. All the  search engines count links as “votes,” but nowadays search engines rely heavily on link analysis as a way to improve relevancy.

You can imagine the web as a weighted democracy which counts every link as the vote of trust. But the more authority the page linking to you has the more value adds the link to your site.

Q: Link Quality

If you have a question about SEO which would you trust more? The advice from five SEO gurus or from fifty random people on the internet who offered their advice to you on the web?

Of course, you’d probably trust the advice from the gurus. Even though you’re getting fewer opinions, you’re getting those opinions from experts. The quality of their opinions carries more weight.

It works the same way with search engines. They’ll count all the links pointing at websites but they don’t count them all equally. They give more weight to the links that are of better quality.

What’s a quality link? It’s something you’ll know it when you see it in many cases. But a link from any large, respectable site is going to be higher on the quality scale than a link you might get from commenting on a blog. In addition, links from those sites that are topically relevant to your site may also count more.

Lt: Link Text / Anchor Text

The words within a link — the link text or “anchor text” — are seen by search engines as the way one website is describing another. It’s as if someone’s pointing at you in real life and saying “SEO” in the example above and declaring you an expert on that topic.

You often can’t control the words people use to link to you, so try hard to get links with the text which is related to your topic.

Ln: Number Of Links

Many sites have found that getting a lot of links can add up to SEO success. Even more so if you’re getting a lot of links from many different sites. All things being equal, 100 links from one site will mean far less than 100 links from 100 sites.

Tactics such as viral link building campaigns, badges and widgets can all be effective at securing large numbers of links and something even search engine representatives have suggested.

But in your quest for links, don’t fire up automated software and begin spamming blogs. That’s a bad thing, in many ways.