How Search engines assess your links?

While back links are important for a site, we know that all the links are not valued equally. Search engines have their own criteria and algorithm to assess the links that come to your site. By having a basic understanding of the factors that are used by search engines assess the link we can become more effective in our link building efforts.

One of the important factors that come into play while linking is the anchor text. Anchor text is nothing but the description that is used on the website through which your site is connected. It is basically the hyper linked text that is used to link to your site. It is not enough just to have a link with your website’s URL, the link will be all the more powerful one if it uses relevant anchor text that is relevant to the content of your website or the web page that it is linking to. The anchor text is nothing but the subject matter of the website or the webpage that it is linking. If a number of sites point to your website using the same anchor text then your position for that particular anchor text or keyword will be boosted tremendously. So you need to balance your linking efforts so that you can make the most important keywords stronger by getting more number of links using that anchor text and the less important keywords can be concentrated at the end.

The next important factor, which is often overlooked or totally ignored, is the text that surrounds the anchor text. In other words, search engine also looks at the context in which your website is linked. So you cannot through in irrelevant anchor text in a page and try to get the benefit of a good quality links. What search engines are trying to do here is to reduce the rate of abuse and to ensure that the linking process takes place in a natural fashion. More than the general content of the page the text that are in close proximity to the anchor text plays a great role in adding value to the link. Search engines want to ensure that your site is referenced in an appropriate context. That is why links from link farms do not fetch great benefit.

You need to have a bird’s eye view or understanding of the principles of search engine optimization to effectively put them into use or to implement them in an effective fashion. If your understanding is compartmentalized then your efforts may not bear full results that they are supposed to.

You will know linking is important but lack of total understanding of why do search engines consider links as an important factor to rank a website can lead to improper implementation. In this case you may be trying to buy links from link farms and actually doing a disservice to your site.

Take into consideration the above points while you are trying to build links for your website.

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