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 the age of your Web site and domain name. This month, we cover the topical relevance of your inbound links.

This is the subject-specific relationship between the site/pages linking to your site and the target keyword phrase.

The importance of your page – and hence your page rank – is filtered by the relevance of your inbound links. If the query is “professional web design”, your page is about Web design, and you have an inbound link from a site about beer tasting, that link will not add very much to the importance score of your page for the query “professional web design.”

But if the inbound link is from a page about Web design, on a site about Web design, and uses the words “web design” in the anchor text of the link (the actual text used in the link), the inbound link will add a tremendous amount to the importance score of your page.

How do you find out how good that link is? Look at how it ranks in the SERPs for the query “web design”. If it’s on the first page, you have just struck gold and have a valued link worth nurturing or even paying for.

The same goes for directories. It’s fine to pay a directory $50/year to list you but before you do this:

1. Make sure the directory category you are listed in is highly relevant to you – dig down to find the category then “submit your URL”
2. Make sure the “link juice” you might get from this directory is worth it by checking its “page rank” – try this free tool

If you can increase the relevance of your inbound links, not only will you benefit from those links but you might get some business too!

Next month, we’ll focus on #9: the link popularity of your site in your topical community.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 11:54 am.