Website Links

As part of your website, you can have links to other websites. The original idea behind this was that if you had a website on a given topic, and you found other websites on the same or related topics, you could have a link to these in order to tell your visitors about the other websites. When discussing links, one uses the term 'incoming links' to describe links from other sites to your site and the term 'outgoing links' to describe links from your website to other websites.

Sometimes links occur as part of the text. For example, when talking about on-line bookstores, I could have a link to the Amazon book website. In order that the visitor knows that there is a link, one usually makes it stand out from the text. The most common convention for doing this is to have it in bold, blue and underlined (see example earlier in this paragraph). However, this convention is not always following, especially on websites whose color scheme clashes with blue (e.g. a website which uses mainly pastel colors).

Many sites also have a 'links' page or a 'resources' page. This is where one can list sites that provide information on the same topic as your website or on related topics. For example, if you have a website about the American Revolution, you may have a page which consists of links to other websites about the American Revolution. Likewise, you may have a page which consists of links to websites about other revolutions (e.g. the French Revolution), if you think this would also be of interest to your visitors.

If there are a large number of sites that you would like to include on your 'links' page, you may want to break this up into multiple pages. Following on from the above example, perhaps a links page for each revolution, plus another page which lists each of these pages. So the visitor is directed to a top-level page, which has links to a list of individual 'links' pages. This way or organizing links is known as a 'directory'.

These are the three common ways of linking to other sites: within text, on a 'links' page (often also referred to as a 'resources' page), or in a directory. Likewise, in terms of incoming links to your site, they can take any of these three formats.

Why Have Outgoing Links?

The main reason to have outgoing links is to tell your visitors about sites that may be of interest. For example, suppose you have a travel agency that sells holidays to New York. Your visitors may want to know what there is to see and do in New York, so you can either include this information on your website, or you could simply have a link to a site with this information (e.g. the New York Tourist Board). This saves you the trouble of adding all this information to your site and also saves you the effort of keeping it up to date.

Of course, if you have a business website, you may not wish to link to websites selling the exact same product or service, as this risks losing your visitors to the competition. However, there is almost always a number of websites which provide complimentary information, which in many cases can help you in selling your product or service.

There are some SEO implications of outgoing links. If you link to websites which Google considers disreputable, your PageRank and your position in the search engines may be reduced. In effect, guilt by association. Many webmasters believe that the converse is true (linking to highly reputable sites improves your search engine position), but this benefit is relatively small and open to debate.

Incoming Links for Traffic

Incoming links serve two purposes; they provide additional traffic and they improve your position in the search engines. The usefulness of incoming links in terms of additional traffic varies widely, depending on a number of factors such as:

• Originator's traffic. If the link is from a site (or, more accurately, a page) which gets a million visitors a day, you are likely to get more traffic than a link from a site that gets 10 visitors a day.

• Location of Link. The location of the link on the page is very important. For example, a link near the top of the page is likely to send more traffic than a link from the bottom of the page. A link which is incorporated in the text will deliver more traffic than one that is part of a link list.

• Link Text and Surrounding Text. If the link text reads something like "The best and most Interesting French Property site with lots of useful advice" you will likely get more visitors than one that reads "And another Typical French Property site".

• Relevance. If the originating site and text are related to your business, then you are likely to get more traffic than one that is not. For example, if you run a travel agency that sells holiday trips to New York, a link for the New York tourist board is likely to deliver more traffic than a link from the San Francisco tourist board.

• Business Type. The nature of your business will have an influence on the percentage of traffic associated with incoming links and the percentage of traffic associated with search engine results. For example, people looking to move to France first look for a nice property in France, then look for a mortgage. The search begins with French property, for which there is a great deal of search engine traffic (e.g. search terms such as 'French Property for Sale', 'Property in France'). The French property websites which receive this traffic frequently carry advertisements for French mortgage websites. Consequently, as a primary search topic, the top-ranking French property websites get most of their traffic through search engine searches whereas most of the French mortgage websites get the majority of their traffic from incoming links (be they paid advertising or otherwise).

Incoming Links for Search Position

As explained Search Engine Results, the order in which websites appear in the search results is based on a calculation of the quality of the website, as calculated by the search engine software. The software uses a number of criteria to determine website quality, the most important of which is the number and quality of incoming links.

The reason that incoming links is used to determine website quality is because it has proven to be one of the most accurate indications. After all, as explained above, one links to websites with provide interesting and useful information; there are few reasons to link to a website that does not (unless the website owner is a friend, business associate, or such). Consequently, every incoming link to your website is an indication that someone thinks it has useful information. A website which has many incoming links is considered useful by many people, one with few incoming links is considered useful by few people. In essence, each incoming link is a vote for your site; the more votes you get, the higher the search engines will rank you.

That being said, some incoming links (votes) are worth more than other's. For example, a link from a highly respected website (e.g. a major newspaper's website) is worth more than a link from a hobby website used to store someone's family photos. It is quite possible for a few links from important websites to have more influence on search engine position that a thousand links from unimportant websites. The calculation of the importance of an incoming link is complex and based on a number of factors, further complicated by the fact that the way in which the calculation is done is changed periodically. However, in general the more difficult it is to get the link, the more valuable it is to have.

Consequently, obtaining a better search engine position than competing websites is not just a matter of getting more incoming links, but rather getting more high-quality incoming links. Of course, this is only one factor that search engines use, but it is an extremely important one (others important factors are discussed in SEO).