The Number One Mistake That Websites Make
Forgive me for the hype. But the way I see it, traffic is more important than anything else. If no one sees your site, what good is all the great content? Its kind of the "what came first the chicken or the egg?" scenario. This is the pervasive argument amongst online marketers. You might have heard that content is King. I agree. But links are the soldiers that let the Kingdom know who is King.
So the way that you can check how many links a site has is by going to Yahoo and typing in the site's URL. If you are researching links, often times we are told to look at backward links.
This shows a sites Link Popularity.
Link Popularity is so 1999! It is a quick and dirty way to see how see how well a site is doing. But it is much more complicated than that. In Google's eyes anyway we know that Google looks at the Page Rank as Well as the Reputation of a link.
- Page Rank: Simply put it is relative importance of a page. You get page rank from other important pages linking to your page. Created by Google Co-Founder Larry Page during his School days at Stanford. Page saw a similarity of the way Scientific papers gain value thru Citations from other esteemed papers and how web pages can gain value thru links.
- Link Reputation: Coined by genius Leslie Rohde who discovered that the link text from a link passes its words onto the page it links to. This is the famous Google Bomb affect which is where you can make a page rank in the engines by merely linking to it enough times with your desired text. This has been numerous times to discredit disagreeable political figures.
Speculation has us looking at the quality of the link. This includes the Authority of the site, the age of the page the link comes from, and the age of the link going to the page. There are other speculations based upon the well publicized patent paper that circulated the web.
Many in the know have stated that this was more of an attempt by Google to fuzzy the playing field and as a barrier to entry for upstart engines, than it was a playbook on how google operates.
All Makeup and No Substance
Additionally, many linkers will only link to their front page (or index page). This is leaving all your other pages handicapped and subject to only the linking from your top down. Besides, it just isn't very natural looking to an engine. Just like an overabundance of traded links is not natural.
So give your internal pages some link love also. This is where great content can attract links. Blogs are great opportunities for this.
Take a look at your internal pages. Do you have any green on the Page Rank Bar? If not you can use some link love to those pages. Be careful though, this bar is not what it seems, and the rumourmill has it that the Page Rank Bar will soon be pretty much worthless.
When your internal pages are respected by Google (respect only comes when you have valued links) then those pages can serve you by getting those pages placed in the SERPS. If you do not have traffic from your internals, then why have any at pages at all?
