Link Building Overview

PageRank Unraveled

Oct 29th

Posted by Sam Harbison in Link Building Overview

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PageRank (PR) is a word often revered by many in the SEO community when launching link building campaigns. When you are a site owner for instance, you would want to obtain high page rankings. As in a competition, the higher the rank, the better you are compared to the rest.

PageRank is an overused term that describes how your site is faring in terms of link popularity and exposure to search engines. Although it is common knowledge now that PageRank is not the only factor the affects a site’s link popularity, as there are quite several of them, site owners and people involved in a link building campaign need to get a glimpse of how PageRank is calculated. The better you understand PageRank, the more effectively you will be able to handle any link building effort.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numerical value that is assigned to a site for the purpose of measuring its importance or relevancy. PageRank was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The concept was inspired by citation analysis conducted on scholarly journals or articles to measure its credibility. The more times a paper gets cited, the more important or credible it is to its peers.

PageRank computes the probability of finding a web page if a person randomly surfs the Internet. Google uses the mathematical formula,

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)), where:

A = Linked Page
tn = Linking Page
C/(tn) = Number of outbound link on v
d = damping factor, normally set to 0.85

Despite its intimidating appearance, the mathematical formula has several implications for obtaining the link popularity of a web site:

  1. If a web page links to another page, it is essentially casting a vote in favor of that page.
  2. If several pages link to a web page, it means it has more votes and deserve a higher rank.

How does Google assign PageRank?

Google PageRank is highly dependent on the quantity of backlinks. An experiment conducted by SEOWatch concludes that the more backlinks a website has, the higher the PR will be. This is logical since the PageRank was designed as a type of balloting system among Web users where site owners “vote” by linking to a particular page to show support. This explains why PR is often referred to as a measure of link popularity.

However, because mere reliance on quality of links have made spamming and search engine manipulations a link building tool in order to influence a site’s positioning, Google’s algorithm includes the quality of backlinks associated to a website in its calculation. If the pages linking to your site have high PR and are considered “high authority” sites, then your page shares a piece of their reputation and improves its link popularity.

Google PageRank considers other factors in assigning values to web sites. These include site age, back link duration and back link relevancy. The fact that Google considers back links’ relevancy helps warn site owners: bad sites can harm your overall total PageRank and your link popularity.

Is there only one type of PageRank?

There are variations of PageRank used by Google in order to measure importance or relevancy.

Google Toolbar PageRank. This feature projects a page’s PageRank as a whole number ranging between 0 and 10, 10 being the highest. In order to restrict and disallow search engine manipulations, the accurate procedure on how Google calculates PageRank is not disclosed. However, there is always stress on the quantity and quality of backlinks to produce higher PR and higher link popularity.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank. Link building campaigns are built around this type of ranking. It returns the actual result produced when a search engine responds to a keyword query. A web page’s SERP rank is indicated by a link’s placement on the SERP. If the page can be found on the top positions in a SERP, the higher its SERP rank. It must be noted that while PageRank plays a vital part in SERP, a myriad of factors are included in its computation. Any link building campaign should be geared towards achieving the highest SERP ranking for a website or websites.

In order to deter search engine manipulation, Spamdexing, and spoofing, as a means of building link popularity, Google is mum on how factors influence PageRank specifically.

What are some tips to improve PageRank?

The encouraging thing about being able to understand PageRank is that webmasters, site owners, or a link building company can determine how to adjust some factors in order to optimize PageRank and improve link popularity. A high PR to add to other link building methods will drive you ahead of competitors. There are three basic areas to consider when optimizing PageRank:

  1. The quality of links you choose to have link to your site. The link you choose and the effort you put in to acquire them are essential in PR optimization. As explained before, quantity and quality of links are important considerations in PR and link building. Choosing link farms and banned sites to link to you would prove disastrous to PR and link popularity.
  2. The site you choose to link out to from your site. In using outbound links, there is one golden rule: ‘Keep PageRank within your site.’ Linking out will decrease your total PageRank compared when you decide not to link out. However, if you choose to link out as part of your link building campaign, experts advise to choose pages that has both a low PR and a lot of links to your site.
  3. The internal quality of your site. Your site’s navigational components and linkages must be able to distribute PageRank within the whole site. To accomplish this, Google’s algorithms must consider as much content in your site as worthy of being indexed. Developing quality content creates more PageRank and boosts link popularity.

While PageRank is a valuable tool, achieving link popularity through PR optimization must be combined with quality visitor experience. Gaining higher PageRank will not amount to any significance if users could not find content to enhance their experience when navigating your site.

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An Overview in Link Building

Oct 12th

Posted by Sam Harbison in Link Building Overview

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Businesses have engaged in advertising wars in order to tap a bigger share in the Internet consumer market. Considering the exponential growth of information and networks online, the opportunities for business growth are tremendous. In businesses’ attempts to launch effective marketing or advertising campaigns to reach out to potential consumers, competition to corner online traffic is fierce. Fortunately, there are diverse methods to achieve this goal. Some use paid advertising on major business portals hoping that the traffic generated by these pages will somehow trickle down into their company website. Others utilize the pay-per-click (PPC) system which is cheaper because one only pays for the user traffic generated.

Another method that has proven to be truly effective in delivering increase in user traffic is link building. An off-page optimization strategy within the SEO framework, link building is the process through which one website is advertised in another website similar in content and/or field of interest. It is one of the best optimization tools available used to increase a site’s popularity, ergo, a business’ online image.

This is precisely why link building is considered one of the most vital factors in the SEO campaign. The idea is for your site to achieve higher page rankings with the search engines, more specifically, by building link popularity.

Link popularity is the quality and number of incoming links that point to your site. When other sites link to yours, this implies that your site is regarded as important; in turn, the search engine considers your site important as well. Therefore, link building as a sales strategy can make or break the business. It is also tedious and time-consuming, and requires a degree of experience and expertise. Nonetheless, the potential benefits of link building have made it a prerequisite among modern businesses who want to maximize their sales and profits. While some businesses may choose to handle their own link building campaigns, others can choose to contract a link building service to assist them.

Link building contributes to the business in five ways:

  1. Acquiring quality traffic from relevant web sites;
  2. Obtaining a favorable image as a valuable resource through high quality links;
  3. Generates visibility, awareness, and credibility of your site;
  4. Allows the site to gain a wider search engine exposure; and
  5. Helps the site get indexed by search engines.

Link building could be inbound, outbound, or reciprocal. Each method has its own pros and cons.

Inbound linking. These are the links that point to your website. Inbound linking has a vast potential of generating user traffic. Whenever a site has a link to yours, some of its traffic will visit your site and increase your link popularity. Indeed, the user traffic that a single link generates is small, but as you build more links, you can see an increase in the number of visitors. Moreover inbound links increase search engine awareness for your site. The more links major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) detect that point to your site, the more relevant it considers your website as. Here are some of the most recommended methods of acquiring links to improve your site’s traffic.

  • Website directories. Registering a site on web directories may be a boring and painstaking process, but pays off in terms of user traffic. There are free web directories and some that require a fee. Other directories offer enhancements that will add exposure and additional ad space for your site.
  • Article directories. One viable way of getting more exposure is to submit content to online article directories. While a monotonous undertaking, it is worth the effort altogether. Submit content or articles that are relevant and newsworthy. Make sure that the website publisher sees valuable content or you will end up wasting time and effort. When you write an article for the article directories, you want to make sure that it is informative and newsworthy. Sales pitches are usually rejected.
  • RSS Feeds and Blogs. Aside from article directories, creating an RSS feed will help improve your site’s visibility. An RSS feed delivers your content to RSS subscribers. In essence, you are bringing your product to users, giving them a reason to visit your site, thereby increasing traffic. Moreover, once the feed is listed in distribution sites, the latter rescans your feed and updates their database information, saving you the effort of resubmitting each time you add new content.
  • Press Releases. This is among the most recommended methods of generating traffic. Press releases may be free to create and release and has the potentiality of generating tons of traffic the instant a media outlet picks up your releases.

Outbound linking. Outbound linking is the placement of links on your site which directs the browser away from your site to another website. Placing a link on your site suggests to your users that there is value to it. Conversely, linking to a site that has similar content with yours generates value to that site from the viewpoint of the search engine. Essentially, you are helping another site gain traffic while increasing the relevance of your own site, provided that the site you are linking truly complements your site.

Reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking or link exchanges refers to the process where two webmasters agree to show the other’s link on their respective sites. A reciprocal link is generally a banner link and/or text to a site that has also created a text and/or banner link to your site. The message of reciprocal links to search engines is that you consider the site valuable to your visitors and are willing to let them leave your site to access the other site. To ensure that you use reciprocal linking effectively, you need to ensure the other site’s credibility and the initial placement of your site. Check on whether you link has been moved or deleted and the functionality of the link and avoid splashing your site with mismatched reciprocal links.

Link building is an arduous process but remains one of the most effective and most recommended optimization tools to ensure online marketing and advertising gains. To maximize the tool’s benefits, link building campaigns must ensure relevant, congruent, and complementary links within your field or industry.

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