Search Engine Optimization Tips for New Websites - page 2

by Jim Pretin, 6/10/2006

But the most important factor for receiving a high search engine ranking, and by far the most challenging, is having a high number of quality, inbound links to your website coming from other websites. This is commonly referred to as a website's "link popularity." The more websites you have linking to you, the more "significant" you become to the search engine, and the higher your ranking will be. For example, Yahoo's website currently has over 30 million inbound links, and Michael Moore has over 500,000 links pointing to his website. This is a tremendous number of links.

So, how can a new website receive this many links? Well, it can't. However, you don't need a million websites linking to you to get listed on the first page of the search engine. For certain keywords, such as "email forms," or "frogs" (I have frogs on my mind today), it may only take 1,500 inbound links to get on the first page. Some of the search results on the first page of the listings for a certain keyword may have 50,000 inbound links, while others might have 1,500. The reason for this is because of the aforementioned criteria already described in the beginning of this article which also play a part in your ranking (keyword relevance, design, etc.). Also, it helps if the links to your website are from websites that have a high ranking for the same keyword that you are trying to target.

If your website is about frogs, and the website that is currently ranked #5 on the first page of Google for the keyword "frogs" has a link to your website on their website, Google considers that a significant link. A single important link, rather than a bunch of irrelevant links, can substantially enhance your ranking. However, getting other websites to link to you is an extremely difficult task.

Extremely well known, popular companies, such as Yahoo, Amazon, and GEICO, already have thousands upon thousands of websites linking to them because they advertise on television. Those companies are household names, and they provide important services, so, naturally, a lot of websites link to them. For the other 99.9% of websites that don't do any real advertising offline, there are several ways to obtain a high number of inbound links.

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