Primer to Inbound links in SEO

In class we discussed the concept of inbound links as an essential measure of website popularity in a search engine optimization context. It seems straight forward – build links pointing towards your website and your pages will rise in the search results accordingly. While that is basically true, there are several caveats to be aware of.

1. Link Quality / Page Rank: Not all links are ascribed equal weight. There are several ways of looking at this. The first way that links differ is in the “page-rank” of the website directing the link. If your website receives a link from the ESPN.com homepage, for example, a website with a very high page rank – your website will receive an outsized boost in the search rankings. On the other hand, if your website has hundreds of links pointing towards it from “linkfarm” websites whose sole purpose is to build SEO links – your website will receive a minimal boost or potentially be hurt from being associated with blacklisted domains
2. Domain Extensions: There are certain domain extensions that carry more weight than others. Links pointing from .edu or .gov websites are considered authoritative and are highly sought after for SEO purposes. The issue in acquiring such links is that those web properties are managed by schools and the government – hence the value ascribed to them. If your website does in fact hold weight as an industry authority, it would stand to reason that some educational and government authorities would link back to your site.
3. No-follow Tags: There are websites and blogs that are aware of the value of their links and within the HTML of their websites attach “no-follow” tags to outbound links. Such links, even from high authority websites, are not valuable for search ranking purposes. Sure, the links may drive direct traffic from people clicking on the links – but the no-follow tag tells search robots not to count them for web popularity purposes.
4. Anchor Text: When linking back to your website, keywords are essential to your strategy. For example, if you're trying to build a keyword such as cocktail dresses to your website (which I am trying to do), you should use "cocktail dresses" as your anchor text (see Alexia Admor dresses as an example above).
5. Content Should Ideally Drive Links: While contacting websites to drive links to your site is a strategy that many take – creating high quality content actually would attract links from a variety of sources that would benefit your website the most. By actually becoming a popular site on the internet by way of your content – links should come in organically.

There are certainly more factors to an “organic” link-building SEO strategy than the ones I listed – but these give the framework from which to orient thoughts. Sourcing high-quality links – from high page-rank sites or .gov or .edu websites (whenever possible) – and avoiding wasting effort on no-follow links should yield success over time. Furthermore, by posting high-quality content to your website, chances are that links will come organically – and that is the point of this whole “link popularity” system on search engines in the first place.