The Importance of External Links for Search Engine Optimization

Category: Search Engine Marketing Guide

Links to your site from other sites are one of the most important factors search engines use to rank your site and the pages within your site. There are a number of factors that search engines look at when evaluating links.

External Links

External links are an important factor in how search engines determine how to rank sites for various searches. These external link factors include:

Link Popularity: Higher-ranked Sites Are Better - Just as your site will have an overall ranking in the search engines, so will any other site linking to your site. Any site linking to your site that is ranked highly will have a more positive impact on your site’s ranking than a link from a site with a low ranking.

Linking Sites Should Be Relevant - Sites linking to your site should be somewhat relevant to your site and vice versa-the more relevant the better. A site linking to your site that has little or nothing to do with your site will have much less positive impact and could possibly have a negative impact.

Links Text Must Be Meaningful - Search engines look at the link text and that is used to rank the page-the more relevant the keyword, the more valuable the link. The most common mistake is to use the text “click here” to define the actual link.

Directories - Links from directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory Project are valuable sources for links. These links are given high value by search engines like Google.