So What Makes the Perfect Link?

Backlinks, that is links ‘back’ to your site from others are just about the most powerful thing there is when it comes to the battle for rankings on Google. But as with anything, there are good, bad and indifferent links, so what makes for a perfect link and how do you go about getting them.

What Do Perfect Links Look Like

Before answering this, let us examine the anatomy of a link, the individual parts that make up the whole.

Part One – Where does the link come from?

This attribute concerns the domain that the page holding the link comes from, what the site is about, the ‘standing’ of the page holding the link and how that link is placed on the page, so you can see, even this simple part is quite complicated.

Part Two – What text is used in the Anchor Text

This is the bit that you would click on if wanting to visit the site. If the link is an image, is it placed within a Header tag (it is thought this might help) and is there any ALT text associated with the image?

Part Three – Where is the link targeted

Is the link pointing to the home page or a page ‘deeper’ in the site?

Why Is The Above Important?

Well, the points in Part One are important as they dictate the ‘power’ the link provides. The Domain is important as ‘important’ ones, sites that are well thought of for one reason or another, like the bbc site, provide much more ‘Omph’ than say a local bakers site.

The relevance of the site to the one being linked to is also taken into account, so getting a link from a site that is relevant to yours, say a link from a vets site to a site selling dog beds, rather than a link from a banking site, is far more beneficial.

Then there is the ‘rating’ for the page that the link is on. This is a matter of concern as even though the front page of a site may be well thought of (have a high Google Page Rank for example) the pages inside may well not be deemed important at all.

Finally in this section the number of links on the page must be taken into consideration, as well as the proximity of the link to the others on the page. The more links there are and the closer they are together, the less powerful the link will become.

Part Two is a lot simpler, this being all about the words used in the linking text (or the Alt text in case of an image). Here it is important to use ‘descriptive text’ as these words are used by the Engines to decide what the target site is all about. Use it unwisely and you can really use a lot of potential linking power.

Part Three is too quite simple, it being about the page on a site that is the target for an incoming link. Bascially you can either link to the HOME page of a site or a page INSIDE the site. It is a bad idea to direct 100% of links to either, it being best to have a sort of 40 / 60 split in favour of pages INSIDE the site. These are known as DeepLinks and are an essential part of any linking strategy.