The video and transcript will take you into greater detail on the link signals, so have a look and then see how you can apply this information to your own web properites.

For those readers among you, read on there is a transcript that follows.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line, welcome. This is going to be the beginning of a review, a SEO review, of the SEOmoz, Beginners Guide to SEO, and we’re in Chapter 7. This is going to be a multi-part video series on Chapter 7. There’s a lot of stuff in here. And Chapter 7 is about growing the popularity of your website and how important links are and doing that.

 

The way the search engines crawl the web is they follow the links. They call them the streets between pages. I think the links are really the blood vessels that carry the blood throughout the whole system. Links aren’t everything in SEO but search professionals attribute a larger portion of this algorithms to link based factors, yes, How many links you have, the quality of the links you have, where the links are going, how many links are coming in, how many links are going out. A lot of factors surrounding links. Trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy sites. Spammy sites, we already kind of talked about that. So, important, the opening paragraphs here are simply understate, underscore, I should say, the importance of links.

 

Link signals that are used by the search engines; so before you can set up your link campaign, you have to figure out what are the things that search engines look for in links. Now, this is all kind of the hidden recipe by the search engines. They don’t let anybody know. But a lot of people can guess at what they are. So one signal is the global popularity of a website. The more popular and important a website is the more important its links are that it sends out to sites and that it receives.

 

If you’re Wikipedia, you have a lot of authority, and your links mean a lot and you’re very trustworthy. If you’re a .gov or a .edu site, the same holds true. So, global popularity, is very important because these sites have authority and trust, that is, the search engines trust them and give them a lot of authority. ocal topics, specific popularity; so there’s an outfit, Teoma search engine, that suggests that links from sites with topic specific community matter more than links from a general one often. So, you want the links coming in to coming from sites that are related to what you’re talking about, that’s really what that says.

 

Anchor text; one of the strongest signals in the past was anchor texts. Rather than click here you wanted the text linking to you to have some meaning related to what was on your site. So anchor text is important, but the penguin update has made certain changes to that. They don’t want exact match, anchor text, now they want semantic variations of the anchor text, but anchor text is still there although how you practice it has changed.

 

Trust rank; trust rank simply means there’s a hierarchy of websites that I mentioned before .edu’s, .gov’s, Wikipedia type sites that at the very high end of the trust and authority spectrum, and the closer you are in clicks to those initial top trusted sites the more authority and rank you’ll get. So, the higher your trust rank, the better off you are. That’s really what that means.

 

Link neighborhood; well, this is, again, going back to the concept you get judged by the company you keep. You want the links coming in to be good. You want the links going out to be going out to both sites. Freshness, how recent are the links? Is the link pattern consistent and coming in over time, so that you just don’t have an old site that’s sitting there with an old bunch of links. Social sharing; now you’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Goggle + and all these, Stumble Upon and all of the bookmarking sites. All sorts of social sharing factors now going into your link profile, and it’s important that you understand that. You’ve got to understand the power of social sharing, how Google +, Twitter, and Facebook change the game, and you have to make sure that in your social campaign and strategy you integrate links to and from those websites.

 

That’s the basic introductory part of Chapter 7. Part two will be about link building basics, but for now these are the basic concepts that you want to understand in part one of Chapter 7 So I hope this has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne, Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well and we’ll talk to you soon.