Building Search Engine Relevance With Links For A Home Based Internet Businesses

By Author: Al Terry
Total Articles: 787
Comment this article

Understanding how search engines value link popularity for a web site is often confusing to novice webmasters. Many feel that they just need to get as many links as possible to build home based Internet businesses. More and more linking is being frowned upon by the search engines as many have abused about every avenue they could in their link domination of the web.

Links can still help better search results for web pages if done correctly. Search engines look at off-page links or in-pointing links to a web site and it's pages to form an opinion of relevance for the page. If a page about New York baseball history has a ton of links pointing to the page from other sites about ballet dancing in Chicago the search engines will not rank the page much better then if it had no links coming in. The search engines algorithm is looking for organic and natural link patterns that show how relevant the page is.

If the search engines are able to find many different links from many different web sites that they already know are high quality sites pointing into your pages the search results will fly to the top. It should be ...
... fairly easy to understand why the search engines look for these differences in links when trying to rank web pages on the net. If one looks at links as a "vote" then when a high quality and already well established resource site covering the same theme and topics puts a link on their page recommending that their visitors take a look at another web sites page it creates relevance.

The search engines are not and never really were looking for "the site with the most links", they use the linking algorithm in order to help filter out bad pages and sites and locate the top sites of a particular theme. Home based Internet businesses need great in coming links in order to succeed online.

Webmasters have a funny way of going "all out" as soon as some new search engine tactic is unleashed. The natural evolution of search engines using link popularity for ranking web pages was always to help locate the most relevant pages for any particular subject matter and topic. Of course it takes time for search engines to develop the new criteria and make it work online. Within this "growing" period most webmasters looked for links anyway they could, now these tactics have come back to be worthless or hurt them.

Most would say the best way to get these types of links is to create a valuable resource on a topic for the net. The web site must be valuable to visitors in order to be valuable to the search engines. Creating content for a web site which delivers great information, even the best information about a topic will lead other related web sites to link to the pages. This is the "natural" patterns that search engines look for since each web site linking to the page will use different anchors and descriptions for the site. A web page which has the five hundred in coming links all with the same anchor text and description does not look natural to search engines and may even get your web site banned.

I am not saying to throw all link building strategies down the toilet because just building great content on a general topic will work the best, although it actually will work the best it is not the quickest way to grow home based Internet businesses. The fact is though it is probably the safest way to grow a web site online and in the long term will most likely get great search results and free targeted traffic. Great content for a site is already a prerequisite for marketing online and link building can be extremely time consuming with minimal results, especially in these times where "any old' link won't do". Keep the focus on the site and how it can be bettered for the visitors and the links will come along with the relevance to the search engines.
For more resources on building web sites and Internet marketing for Starting Home Based Internet Businesses check out more of Al's free lessons online. His helpful articles cover every topic and subject for making an income from home with home based Internet businesses.