Incoming links checklist for search engine rankings

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Everyone wants to get traffic to their websites. Search engines send a lot of qualified traffic, if your website meets certain criteria in their eyes. Let’s take a look at a checklist of signs of quality. How many does your website have? If the signs of quality are low, you may expect to rank poorly. You can start working now on improving your website’s rank:

Signs of website quality to search engines

A quick note: when I say signs of quality to the search engines, I more rightly should say: signs of quality to the search engine engineers who design the ranking system. Certain comments they may make publicly, as well as observation of basic facts should prove this list to be relatively accurate.

High Quality Websites have a broad array of incoming links from a wide range of IP address ranges. - This is almost universally true of any hugely popular websites. They’ll receive an enormous amount of links from every type of source.

Not all incoming links go the main page of the site. A popular domain will have tons of incoming links to various entry points. Deep-links to content are the most common from of incoming links to high quality websites. I have no reason to think this is a huge rule, but for sure interior content pages with deeplinks will rank much easier than configuring your main page for a ton of keywords.

Clean re-written URLs never hurt. Why not put the main keywords in the URL? It’s just sort of neat looking.

A variety of links. A lot of people unwittingly and mistakling parrot the party line that reciprocal linking is dead. It will never die, nor should it. Whether recip links are a deadly weapon of SEO or not, they can help you and visitors alike. It’s more likely that if you employ one linking technique only, you end up “triggering some sort of filter” - whatever that might mean. A quality website has links from all kinds of neighborhoods and all kind of links.

A high ratio of one-way links is a good sign of quality. This means the website was “voted for” without offering something back. One-way links to me refers to, again, deeplinks, rather than all links pointing to the main page. I doubt you have to obsess about the ratio, but common logic dictates that most content articles that have links from outside of their own domain

You also need links from websites that spidered regularly. If you receive an incoming link from a website, but their crawl priority is low, you may not receive the benefit of the link for sometime. If the website that links to you has a lot of incoming links, some of the effect will rub off on you.

Don’t look for “magic” links which will do more than others. In many ways, all links can help you. The more you have, the better for purposes of establishing your website as a winner. It makes sense: people tell others about their favorite websites.

If nothing else, quality incoming links mean that your website will be spidered more often. This is half the battle, just having your fresh content found.

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