4.7 Factors that make up quality links

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When you decide whether you need a link from some page or not, there's a number of factors that can help you make up your mind. And these are not just things to add up to each other. You should carefully look at them, when building your links. I'll tell you about some of the most important factors that contribute to the quality of a link. For the convenience of us both, I'll call them quality factors, or Q-factors in this book.

Relevance of your and your partner's site

When I talk of relevance of a potential partner's website to yours, I mean how close your partner's offer is to what you sell. If a web site has a complementary offer, it's great to have a link from it.

Well, say you've got a travel agency and have a site for it. One link to you comes from a website selling detailed maps and travelers' guides of countries and cities, while another link to you stands on a site that sells wallpaper.

The first website is connected with traveling, so it's thematically relevant to your site, and Search Engines will value the link coming from it more. The second website is thematically irrelevant (travels and wallpaper normally don't come together). And therefore, this link won't be that trusted by Google or Yahoo!

And it's not only Search Engines who looks at the relevance of a site that links to you. People who're visitors of the website that sells golf clubs may be happy to click a link saying find golf course in your location. But if you're a meat products wholesaler, the habitual visitor of www.vegetarian-food.com won't appreciate the link to you.

So think of this when building your links.

Getting links from sites that are thematically relevant to yours must be your thumb rule from now on.

Right anchors

Say, I want to get high rankings for the search term wedding ideas. I will try to use this keyphrase in my links' anchor texts.

Let me remind you: an anchor text is the text that's the clickable part of your link. And you must use your keywords in it.

For good SEO, anchor texts of inbound links you're getting MUST contain your keywords.

Moreover, all your links must look natural. If you're getting 1,000 links, you shouldn't use the same anchors for all of them. Think: if 1,000 persons naturally put links to you, they wouldn't use the same anchor texts — people don't think absolutely the same.

This is true to check — and I did check this myself. I asked my relatives to say in a couple of words what I do. Here's just a few replies:
"You promote websites"
"You do SEO"
"You optimize sites"
"You're in Internet marketing"
"You idle about in front of computer, just like these little kids" — that's my wife's granddad, just turned 89.

So there's dozens of ways to say one and the same thing.

Normally in SEO you ask someone to put a link to you — and you suggest an anchor text yourself.

Anchor texts should be slightly different. I don't mean that all 100 links must have different anchors, but at least there should be some 10 groups having different texts.

Let's remember the table we made in the previous chapter.

Look at the first group of keywords. Though I'm specifically targeting wedding ideas, I'll also use wedding ideas flowers, wedding ideas pictures, wedding ideas Australia and so on. Plus, you've got an even bigger list of keywords where you can take other terms to create variations.

Good context for links

Links will look more natural if they come in a natural context. I mean, text around the link should also be relevant. Want en example?

Getting married soon? Make your wedding unforgettable! Get fresh wedding ideas and plan your wedding with us!

Here the link with the anchor text wedding ideas is used in a keyword-rich context and appears very natural. The link is naturally built-in into the text.

If possible, choose text that will surround your links.

Also, there's such a thing as link description. Quite often your link will also be accompanied by a description — a short text telling what's to be found through the link.

Along with your anchor texts, vary your link descriptions every so often, too, so it looks perfectly organic to Google. Here's a small example for wedding ideas:

Here's an example from http://www.catalogs.com/clothing.html :

Don't underestimate the value of anchors and descriptions. Better spend a bit more time and put some effort into writing at least several proper link descriptions. This way, you'll not only provide more value to the human visitors, you will also make search engines rank your site higher in their SERPs, because your linking strategy will look more natural.

DO IT NOW! Write at least 5 slightly different anchor texts and descriptions, well-stuffed with keywords.

Keywords in title and body of the partner's page

That's probably another dimension of relevance. Search Engines put more value to links that come from sites that have your targeted keywords in their page titles and body text. Sounds too difficult? Here's a real-life example.

When I met my wife, I not only liked the way she looked. I was pleased to find out that she also loved to hear Depeche Mode, watch Scarface and read Tom Wolfe, and hated tomatoes just like I did. You see we had a lot in common, and it wasn't a surprise to anyone that we married soon.

Same thing happens in SEO: if you are "friends" with some webpage, it's supposed to have something in common with yours.

Of course it's not wise linking to a competitor's page, though it may have plenty of keyword coincidences with yours. Still, it's possible to find hundreds and even thousands of non-competing pages.

For instance, if you sell cats food, and one of your keywords is smooth-coated cats food, you could get a great link from a webpage entitled "Cats pictures — smooth-coated cats and kittens".

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