Understanding Inbound Links
Thursday, August 6th, 2009Many of types of links can be beneficial for direct traffic if placed well, but will often only be counted once or twice rather than dozens or hundreds of times no matter how many times they occur on a web site. The first concept to understanding is that there are many types of links that can be targeted, not just an anchor text link with two or three words to a particular page of your site.
1) URL or Web Page Links – these links are directed to a URL of a web site. This type of link to a specific page does increase the general authority of that particular page and is beneficial to use to increase the natural occurrences of inbound links to a web site.
2) Name Links – these links include the anchor text of the particular page or perhaps even the title of the page’s context. An example might be a page with the anchor text of “SEO Position” where the URL used points to our own company home page.
The later of the two above is one of the most used types of links from directories or resource-type sites who simply describe the “landing page” with more intuitive text for the user to understand the page’s contents.
3) Exact Anchor Text – this type of inbound link points to and describes exactly what a page is about using specific targeted keywords. An example of this linking method would be the anchor text “content writing” which points to a specific page about content writing and targets specific search terms. These types of text links can be confused with name links mentioned above, although they are more targeted and commonly used by webmasters wanting to build ranking for particular terms and pages. Name links happen more randomly, making them seem more natural to search engines.
The second are of inbound links include the locations in which links are acquired.
1) Contextual Linking – links in this category are simply links within any body of context or paragraph/sentence where the link appears. This type of link is perhaps the most beneficial since search engines have the ability to understand context wrapping around the text link, thus weighing it more heavily as a resource or authority.
2) Directory Links – simply achieved by the “title” field that almost every directory asks for when submitting your URL, these types of links appear on categorized pages and often include a simple anchor text with a description after it. Directory links can be beneficial for your web site if understood and used properly.
3) Site Wide Links or Run of Site (ROS) – These links were used by many webmasters and companies a year or two ago and are still used today. The effectiveness of these links are less weighted because search engines now understand that, let’s say, link to site “widgetmaker.com” appears on every page on the right-hand side in the navigation area, thus saturating its effectiveness.