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 Hyperlinks, or just “links”, are the pathways that lead from one website to another. The Internet was built on this series of interconnections between sites. Links are seen on virtually every page on the Internet, and when clicked by the mouse they send the Internet surfer to another page, either on the same Web site, or on a different Web site entirely.
A link from your page at “mypage.htm” pointing to another page on another website or domain is called an outgoing or – more correctly – an outbound link; the link leads out from your page. When you link to another page of your own site, this link is outbound too, relative to the page on which it is placed.
Respectively, when a page out in the Web or within your Web site links to your "mypage.htm", this link is incoming, or inbound, for "mypage". A “recipricol” or “backwords” link contains both inbound and outbound links to the same two websites. Links are important for helping human users find interesting, informative, and useful content on the Internet, and they have special value to the search engines, like Google and Yahoo!. Search engines consider the number, age of link, and link quality when applying ranking algorithms to pages. They follow a simple logic: the more incoming links a Web page receives, the more other pages and Web sites have cast their "votes" for this Web page by considering it an interesting resource. Thus, this page should get ranked high. Remember search engines rank pages, not sites. Thus, if the home page of our example site promoting weather forecasting software is not considered interesting by other webmasters it will have few inbound links to it from other sites; on the other hand, a page on the same site about horoscopes contains interesting horoscope facts and has many inbound links from other sites. Fortunately, this is not the case for our weather forecasting software site, and all pages have good link popularity. But if this were the case, our horoscopes page would not rank much higher than our home page, primarily on Google, notwithstanding that we optimized both pages equally well. Encountering a similar situation, webmasters and optimizers with little experience start guessing what the problem is; more experienced ones check their link popularity as this is often the primary clue to the problem. While quantity of links is important, quality is even more important. Search engine algorithms are intentionally built to give some inbound links more value others. Simple links are not given the same weight as links with the following advantages: - Links from pages deemed to be more relevant, in terms of topic and theme;
- Links labeled with more keyword rich anchor text and surrounded by the relevant descriptions;
- Links from pages with higher Google Page Rank;
- Links that originate within content pages rather than from the "links pages" and free-for-all link catalogs. However, this doesn't concern the pages of Web's most popular directories DMOZ and Yahoo!, while the links from them are considered "expert".
Inbound links are generally helpful to the site that receives the link, but there are exceptions. Luckily, there is no possibility of getting your site banned or excluded from listings if you get a "bad" inbound link from a penalized website; search engines recognize that no one can control who links to their website. Some incoming links, including those from guest books, link farms and free-for-all link pages provide almost no gain in the rankings because they are generally ignored by the search engines. Becoming involved in any linking scheme solely designed to trick the search engines into providing higher rankings could result in a penalty, or even an outright ban. All such schemes should be avoided. The concept of Link Popularity refers to the number and quality of links inbound to your web site pages - the higher the number of links pointing to your page, the higher your link popularity. However, the number itself is not the only factor that determines your site's importance. The other related factor that determines your site's importance is link quality. The quality of a link may be thought of as the quality of content in the sites that are linked to yours, as well as the industry relevance to your site. Then, the link anchor text (the actual text of the hyperlink visible to the visitors of the linking site) adds to the link quality if relevant to your content. The number of links on the linking page itself is considered vital by some search engines. The link will not be given much weight if it is placed on a page with thousands of similar links. However, if the page linking to yours has only few links or a low link-to-content ratio, this is considered a quality link. Your work with links MUST constitute a key part of your Search Marketing strategy. We recommend that you spent 50% of your time spent working on your website optimization efforts with building high quality link popularity. What you should remember - Nowadays, good link popularity is the core element of "off-the-page" factors, and overall plays a more important role than all on-the-page factors put together when it comes to high rankings in the search engines.
- High-quality inbound links are your main target. High-quality links are those that come from the pages with rich content relevant to yours and with low number of other links.
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