Create Useful Links

Search engines consider the quality of your site's ingoing and outgoing links when determining where to place your site in search results. Ingoing links are links from other sites to your site. The best way to encourage people to link to your site is to write for users.

Outgoing links are links from your site to other sites (the links you add). When evaluating outgoing links, search engines consider several factors:

• link text
• relevance of the target site
• number of links

Link Text

Search engines consider the text used in the anchor tag to make the link. The text is given is a little more weight, similar to text in heading tags. When possible, you should add your site's search terms to your link text. But only if, of course, the link text is readable and useful. Here are some general tips for creating link text:

• Link text should be a natural part of the surrounding text. Avoid "click here" links.
• Use meaningful words or phrases for your links. By simply scanning the text of your links, the reader should be able to derive some meaning about each link's destination.
• Choose an appropriate length for your link text. One word might be too small; a full sentence might be too long and difficult to read.
• Use link text that has a conceptual similarity to the title or headers of the target document.

Page Relevance

Search engines give more weight to links (both outgoing and ingoing) that link related pages. For example, if you are creating a page on jellyfish and link to another jellyfish site, that link will receive more weight than a link from your jellyfish site to a site about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. By considering the relevance of linked pages, the search engines avoid having to consider all the useless links created by Free For All link exchanges that might skew search rankings.

Number of Links

While having links on pages is important (that is, after all, why the Web was created: to link information), you want to be careful not to put too many links on a page. Google recommends putting fewer than 100 links on a page. If you have a page with a lot of links, you may want to consider excluding it from search engines, so that it is not mistaken for a link exchange (which can hurt your site's ranking).