3. In the development period of Google's existence, its
founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were burning the
midnight oil trying to discover a way to determine the
importance of a web site.
5. The basic idea is simple: If web site "A" has a lot of other
web sites linking to it, then all these llinking sites must
think that web site "A" is important.
6. In other words, each incoming link to your web site can be
considered as a vote. The more votes your web site
achieves, the more importance Google, and other major
search engines will give to it. This means that in the all
seeing eyes of search engines your web site is more
relevant if it has a lot of incoming links. So the more
relevancy you can acquire for your web pages means
higher search engine rankings (all major search engines
appear to have adopted the Google model).
7. After your web site has been assessed for the number of
incoming links (or backlinks), and the quality, see later, of
those links, Google will assign a value, called Page Rank
(PR), to the web pages on your web site. This is a numeric
value between 0 and 10. Higher PR indicating more
importance.
9. Unfortunately the answer is NO! This is because the
Google algorithm is a complex beast. There are over one
hundred other things that Google check for, and there are
different types of links. Each type carrying more or less
relevancy.
11. 1) Outgoing: where your site links to another site. No use
to you in terms of PR.
12. 2) Reciprocal: where two sites exchange links, this now has
less value than it used to have since a recent Google
update, but is still effective on other search engines.
13. 3) One way Incoming: A link to your site pure and simple,
where your site does not link back. This is what you need
to build PR. This is a vote for your site and is far more
powerful than a reciprocal link.
15. Now you know the type of link that's needed (how to get
one-way incoming links will be discussed elsewhere) there
is still more that will affect your PR. This concerns the link
anchor text. Link anchor text is the visible part of a link,
i.e., the text you click on.
16. Link anchor text in a link pointing to your home page
should contain the main keyword that your home page is
optimised for. However, if you have many links all with the
same anchor text it looks, to Google, like spamming and
may cause lesser significance being given to those links.
Therefore, vary your anchor text.
17. As can be seen, generating a successful crop of links can be
a time consuming process. And there are many pitfalls
along the way.