SEO Foundations for Small Business Owners by Eli Davis - HTML preview

External Links and Link Building

Links from other websites are a powerful ranking factor. The way external links work for SEO relates to the notion of PageRank, an algorithm used by Google to rank websites and web pages.

While there’s lots of complex math behind PageRank, the implications for SEO are so simple you could describe them with four sentences:

1. Google assigns a certain amount of ranking value to every website.
2. Every link has a certain amount of ranking value behind it.
3. Every time you link your web page to some other online resource, you share your ranking value with it.
4. Every time someone else links their web page to your site, you get a part of their ranking value.

Now, that was simple, wasn’t it? Actually, things get more complicated if you go into detail. in particular, you can instruct search engines that a particular link isn’t meant for sharing ranking value. To do that, you can assign the “nofollow” value (rel="nofollow") to the link. Besides, there are additional details that you can learn about from this post.

The field of SEO concerned with attracting links to a website is known as link-building. The ultimate way of building external links comes down to creating content that people feel compelled to share. Having your business covered in media or writing guest posts for other blogs are additional means of getting links from external sources. While link building itself is a topic for another ebook, you can grasp the basics from these sources:

• Back To Basics: 5 Fundamentals Of Link Building That Will Never Go Away (searchengine-land.com)
• Growing Popularity and Links (moz.com)
• How External Deep Linking and More Content Can Boost Your Rankings (searchengine-journal.com)
• How To Analyze A Link: Link Building Basics (searchengineland.com)