Exactly What Is A Related Link For SEO?

[jcorkern]

People in marketing and SEO forums, affiliate related blogs and many other webmaster sites have been spewing out that you need related links for them to be effective with Google , Yahoo and MSN to carry any weight with these major players in the natural search results. But you never hear them tell what a related link truly is, so we will cover this in this article.

I must start out by telling you that to understand this you have to understand that the search engines do not have the ability to reason. They can not understand that a shark site is somewhat related to a site about fish. So, with this example they are similarly related on a human platform but not even remotely related to a search engine.

So what platform does a search engine use to consider a link related. It is actually easier than you might think. Relation is determined by the onpage of the page the link is on. Now, before we go any further, the relation of a link has nothing to do with the site. It is only the page that the link is on that determines the relevance of the link.

Now that we have established that the page the link is on is the only page that counts, lets get into the factors on the page that make it relevant to the search engines. Having one or more of your keywords in the title and or the content is what makes a page relevant. Anything else is not considered relevant.

This is something that most do not understand about what is relevant as far as links are concerned and a main reason why SEO Companies use articles are the main staple of their link building program.

With articles you control the title and content of the page on the article directory that it is published on. And this gives high quality links to their clients sites.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Very informative Jim. You have a way of clarifying details that
really helps people cut through the mis-information and get to the meat!

 

[Arun Lakhera]

Jim your post has clear all the doubts about links. You have intelligently summed up that submitting good articles to directories is the best way to get one-way quality links. Keep posting?.

 

[marketraise001]

Jim things are different for Google and the rest of search engines including the likes of yahoo and msn.Linking to Google by the means of an add url indicates to Google that the website is relatively new.Rather I would suggest that you ask the webmasters of related web pages and sites to link to your pages, and encourage your readers to link to your site. This will bring people in directly, and it will also allow search engines like Google to find you.

 

[Arun Lakhera]

Here, I would like to raise a question. How can we encourage our readers to link our site? Can someone throw some light on this issue?

 

[Rob_TID]

Jim - spot on article.

However, if you are competing in a smaller pool (let's say a regional website like .com.au or co.nz) then often unrelated links will be enough to get you accross the line. Just something to think about.

 

[MrCat]

Very nice input indeed! Another relevant aspect of SEO is PR building based on quality and targeted links. On a more marketing perspective, I would generally suggest that having more targeted backlinks would offer more chances of getting the right visitors to your site.

To Arun, either you contact the webmaster directly offering some useful content from your site or you venture into link baiting. More organic links (links from sites naturally linking to your site) are favored in PR building as well. Article marketing as what the OP suggested is a nice link baiting technique. Hope that helps

 

[jcorkern]

Here, I would like to raise a question. How can we encourage our readers to link our site? Can someone throw some light on this issue?

There are several ways to get customers to link to you. The first is to have interesting content on the page. the next is to have bookmarking codes on the page, like a digg button. the 3rd way is to ask for the link. you could write is similar to this.

Think this page is interesting, why not link to us and show the world what you found. We have already made it easy for you, just copy and paste the following code into your blog or site.

put a code box with you link html below the pitch.

 

[marketingmama]

Does that really work? Sounds bold and confident. I want to try that. Maybe being sure of yourself and coming across as though you already know you've got the goods that people want to link to makes it seem even better.

Thanks,

Sheree

 

[MrCat]

You will never know until you tried it Just be confident that you have really unique and useful content in your niche before proceeding with it..