The “quality” of a website can be measured in two main ways, the quality of actual content as determined by both search engine algorithms and human reviewers and the popularity of the website as measured by the number of other websites linking to yours.
Remember that your site has to appeal to your human visitors once they find you, as well as to the search engines they use to find you!
The most important measure of quality as far as the search engines are concerned is the quality, relevance and importance of the sites that link to yours. Their quality is assessed by their page rank, their relevance relates their content topic to yours - in other words they need to be on the same or closely related theme. Their importance is judged by factors such as “authority” e.g. University sites, professional organisations, media etc are the kinds of sites that are considered authoritative, as a websites run by people with acknowledged expertise in their field. The quantity of visitor traffic to a given site also has a bearing on its importance in this respect.
Once you have built your site content to the level that you are satisfied it has value and appeal to a human visitor or reviewer, it is time to set about building your linking strategy. Inbound links (or backlinks as they are known) fall into four distinct categories:
1. Quality - a small number of high quality links, as defined above, is more valuable than a large number of links of lesser quality.
2. Quantity - once you have some really good links, they can be reinforced with a growing number of relevant but lesser quality links.
3. Irrelevant - links from websites that have no content related to yours and low page rank have very little use as far as boosting the quality of your site is concerned. They may haowever, bring you direct visitor traffic from the lonking site so should not be overlooked.
4. Bad Company - these are the websites you do NOT want links from as they can harm your perceived quality. Examples include:
Web Rings
Link Farms
Gambling, pornographic websites (unless of course you are also in these industries!)
Sites with illegal content (warez, illegal downloads etc.)
Sites which peddle hate, prejudice and suchlike…..
So how do you find quality websites?
1. Download the Google Toolbar and enable Page Rank from the settings menu in the toolbar.
2. Do a search for your topic and keyphrases in Google and list the top thirty sites that come up in the results pages for each phrase/topic.
3. Load each of the websites above into your browser and check their page rank in the toolbar.
4. Go to www.linkpopularity.com and type in the URL (web address) of each of these sites in turn to find their link popularity (number of backlinks)
5. Go to www.alexa.com and check each site above for traffic.
These few simple steps will get you started with a list of posible sites to request links from.
I shall cover linking strategies in more detail in a future article. Meantime let’s take a look at the final measure of importance of your own website i.e. that of Up To Date Content.
The “fresher” your content, the more interest it is to search engines as they try to give their customers the best information they can.
Websites that are constantly being updated generate more frequent visits from search spiders to get the new content. This is turn makes your site more attractive to the search engines as they are seen to be more “active”.
As previously mentioned, the theory of good website optimisation is simply to provide the search engines, especially Google, with what they say they want - namely relevant, quality, up to date content. When you have done that you will have truly earned the free visitor traffic coming to your website.
Keep an eye on the Web Marketing category of this site for information on the other methods of getting traffic i.e. Buying It and Borrowing It.