Link reputation is the key to good rankings

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This article covers some SEO Basics. The subject of SEO can be complex, when in reality it shouldn’t. Although experts design the hardware and software configurations that make up search engines, the heart of the system is still human. Search engines are trained to look at characteristics of website so they can rank them based upon perceived qualities. In recent years, the engineers have been modeling the algos on how people actually rank businesses or people in the real world.

The first and most important idea of SEO is website reputation. This consists of mainly who links to you, and who you link out to. Consider the case of a someone offline who needs eye surgery. It is likely that the person who needs the surgery would look for a recommendation from someone they know and trust. Its’ doubtful that a person would ask the local drug dealer who the best Lasik surgeon in town is. The best recommendation would probably come from multiple doctors, who all specialize in Lasik surgery. This is no different from how it works in the search engines. If the bulk of your links come from experts in the field, your website has no trouble ranking for a targeted term. A lot of emphasis is put on linking, but the main keys to linking are:

1) Who you link to in terms of quality
2) Who links to you in terms of quality

Exactly themed links are probably the best, but overall the reputation of the linking sites is what counts. If the websites that link to you enjoy a good reputation, they’ll pass some of it on to you.

This is the whole key to the current ranking system in MSN, Yahoo, and especially Google. If you get links from well-established websites, then you have some “juice” which rubs off on your own site. If your website never gets links from popular and trusted resources, you can expect to be on the outside looking in for quite some time.

How do you determine whether the sites you get link from have good reputations? There are some tell-tale signs. For one, they usually have decent PageRank and a lot of incoming links of their own.  A website with a ton of outgoing links will generally have a tougher time passing on reputation, as well.  The easiest way for you to look for websites with a good reputation is to run related queries and see who ranks.  If you focus your efforts on getting links from the top two or three websites in your category, you’ll greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to rank.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to the Sootle RSS feed!.