Links vs. Content: A Needless Debate - Then Links are the Queen...
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Keyword rich content will get you part way to your destination atop the search engine results. If you are seeking to gain high search engine results for highly competitive keywords, content is perhaps not enough on its own. The King needs help.
Every King needs a Queen. In this case, the Queen is links.
You want your website to rank highly, and content alone is not enough. Your site needs a good linking strategy to add incoming links to your valuable content. You should also consider linking out to good quality sites that are of help and of interest to your visitors.
With newer algorithms thought to be taking link context and site themes into consideration, you will want to be sure your linking policies take them into account. Consider the needs and requirements of your visitors first, and you are unlikely to go wrong.
Search engine algorithms not only consider the number of incoming links, but also their quality. It is thought that links from websites with a similar topic or theme to yours will carry much more weight than links from highly dissimilar sites. Some thought has also been given to the value of linking out to sites with closely related themes.
In establishing what could be considered by search engines to be an “authority site,” a website’s linking structure is very important. A group of links to and from sites on the same topic as yours would go a long way toward establishing an authority site. It is thought that such sites will be given strong placements in the search engine results.
Make certain as well that your site maintains a strong ratio of incoming links to outgoing links. For every link going out to other sites, be sure to have several websites linking into your site.
Incoming links increase your website’s Google PageRank, which is the measure of the relative importance of a Web page on the Internet. A higher PageRank gives your site a boost in the Google algorithm. While PageRank is only one factor in the calculation, it is part of the algorithm, and therefore requires some consideration.
For off page linking benefit, it’s considered good practice to use theme related anchor text to lead to your site. The anchor text should be some targeted keywords specifically directed to the page being optimized. By aiming different keyword anchor text toward different Web pages, the possibility of an over optimization penalty can be removed entirely.
While SEOs disagree as to the extent of the algorithm working against too many keywords used too often as off page anchor text, it’s easier to be safe than sorry. Varying the keywords in the off page anchors should help to eliminate that problem.
Don't neglect your internal site linking. When placing a link to another Web page on your site, be sure to use link anchor text relevant to the receiving page. While the link popularity value might be fairly weak, the development of an overall relevant site theme is very important. Internal linking through sitemaps and page to page links help in that regard, as well as assisting visitors to easily navigate the site.
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