Recently, we’ve been focusing on important factors that can affect your Web site’s visibility in the search engines. Last month, we focused on link popularity within the site’s internal link structure. This month, we cover the global link popularity of your web site. Actually, that should probably read, “link authority.”

Your web site must be important because you have 1,000 links coming in, right? Wrong.

You may have 1,000 links coming in but 90% of those links are from generic “snake oil” link farms or web sites that have NOTHING to do with your site’s subject. In other words, you are not as important as you thought.

It’s about both link QUALITY and, to a lesser extent, QUANTITY. If you are linked from a web site that already has good rankings then your site will benefit from that “link juice” because that link will show the search engines that your site is important enough to be linked to and give you credit for that with a decent rank.

Plus if you are using keywords in the “anchor text” (the link) that relate to the page being linked TO, you will get the benefit of a decent rank for those terms.

If you can get inbound links from authority sites in your field (e.g. industry directories, .edu education sites, experts) then you are on the way to being golden. The more of these you can get, you are gold.

To see what “backlinks” your site (and your competitors!) currently has, you can either use Yahoo!’s Site Explorer tool or Backlinkwatch.com. Both will show you a pretty accurate number of inbound links but the latter will show you the Google PageRank of those inbound links.

[One thing to note about PageRank: it's not a very accurate indicator of how Google ranks your page because some of PageRank importance is transmitted to your page from another high-PageRanked site. But that's doesn't take into account the context of the link -- the words in the link -- the anchor text.]

OK, so how do you go about increasing the link authority of your site? Here are some suggestions:

• Get listed in DMOZ, the free directory listing which feed Google
• Get listed in directories which are deemed important (e.g. Best of the Web, JoeAnt, Superpages, business.com, GoGuides) - be prepared to pay a fee for some
• Get listed in industry-related directories (e.g. GlobalSpec for engineering)
• Get links from your clients’ sites
• Write articles on your site that may be used as “link bait” (people will link to them because they are useful, entertaining, or interesting)
• Add free technical downloads for your clients (they may link to or bookmark that page)
• Start a blog and post articles in your field - if they are good, you may get links from other “experts”
• Link to other expert sites in your field then tell them you have done so - you never know, they MAY link back
• Get links from .edu or .gov sites
• Create a community with a forum
• Give something away, run a monthly quiz for a prize, contests

Hopefully, these are just a few tips to increase the authority of inbound links to your web site. Yes, it takes hard work and dedication but isn’t your business or web site worth it?

A last word, don’t obsess over checking the number of back links. Work for a couple of hours per month on this then check using the tools we outlined earlier.

Next month, we’ll focus on #7: the age of your web site.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 1:50 pm.