In some respects, manual link building is a critical part of building high search engine rankings. As we’ve said before, informative and unique content is one of the pillars in building rankings…but to really get in the top 10, you need to have other sites linking to yours.
Without any other sites linking to your site, you will only get you so far in the rankings. But which is better, a higher number of links or the quality of those links?
This is a question that may stump some novice SEO engineers. They may have a landing page, article or blog they’re trying to get ranked for certain keywords and have a lot of different web sites linking to it. However, another web page is dominating top rankings and you can’t seem to quite match or surpass it.
Why is that? What does that page have that mine doesn’t?
Below is a quick video from Rand Fish at SEOMoz that explains the reasons why this would occur and what you can do about it.
First, links from web pages with higher PageRank are much more valuable than links from pages with lower PageRank.
Like we recently outlined in our feature post about PageRank and its importance in marketing your small business online, sites with higher PageRank carry more weight in the search engines. It’s believed PageRank is calculated using a logarithmic scale so the difference between a PageRank of 4-5 versus a PageRank of 2-3 is roughly five to ten times.
Links from pages in the top hierarchy of a website are much better than ones from pages deep within a site
It’s always better to get a link from either another site’s homepage or landing page – no more than about two to three pages from the homepage (i.e. category or landing page) in the site’s hierarchy. First of all, these pages will have higher PageRank. Second of all, visitors to the site will find the link to your site much easier.
It all adds up to a more powerful link than one from say a blog post or generic page with a bunch of links on it.
Most importantly perhaps, sites with higher trust and authority provide more link juice for rankings
Links from sites of well known brands, media outlets or institutes are much more valuable – it definitely will not take near as many links from these to get your search engine rankings to the top. It kind of goes back to the whole PageRank thing since one of the ways to identify authority and trust in the eyes of the search engines is through a site’s PageRank.
So how do I find websites and pages whose links will benefit my website’s rankings the most?
If you’re doing manual link building and come across a website you think would be helpful and possible for you to get a link from, you can use tools like Top Pages and Link Intersect from SEOMoz to find out a page’s PageRank and other important characteristics mentioned above.
Or, consult and work with a premier SEO firm like SEO Advantage who can find all of the avenues to boost your site’s rankings, bring in more site visitors and maximize revenues.
Doing this kind of research first and then getting a small number of links from a select group of websites will prove much more beneficial in getting your webpage’s rankings from say page 2 to the top 5 or 3 results in a search engine query for your keywords than just getting a bunch of links from different low level sites.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Link Quality vs. Quantity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.