We have put together our top 5 factors that you should consider when getting links to your website to determine whether the link is worth getting or not:
1. PageRank of Site
When you are getting links to your site it is important to consider the quality of the sites that are linking to you. PageRank is a very useful measure of the authority of a website and so the higher the better.
If you are not aware PageRank measures the links to and from a webpage and is a number between 0 and 10. Sites with a PageRank of 0 are usually new of low quality and so will add very little value to your site at all.
2. Anchor Text
The anchor text is the text that appears in the link to your website. The text that is used here is very important as it shows the search engines what your web page is about. It is really important to get your keywords in your anchor text if possible as this will determine the phrases that you rank for and will be relevant to your web page.
3. Context of Link
The search engines will look at your link and how it fits in to the page that it is on. For example if a web page is about car insurance and it has a link to your website and your website is about holidays then there is no relevance. This says to the search engines that it is an artificial link and so they will give a lot less value to than if your link was on a page about holidays. So you should always look to get your link on relevant web pages.
4. Number of Links
Another really important thing to consider is the number of outbound links a web page has. The more links a web page has the more artificial your link will appear. For example a link from a page that has 100 out bound links is a lot less valuable than a link from a page that only links to your website. So before you place your link somewhere you should think about how many other people you will be sharing the space with.
5. Domain
Another important thing to consider is the domain of the site that is linking to you. For example .org or .gov websites carry much more authority then more commercial domain names. For that reason you should value any links from these types of sites a lot more highly and should be something you focus on.
You will see from the above that it is not only important to get links to your site but also to consider the type of links. Sometimes it can be better to have less quality links than a large number of low value links that will add little or no benefit to your SEO campaign. Think very carefully before getting a link to your website from another site.
