Bob: There are a number of reasons to have links pointing to your site. But let’s start with reason they were created in first place. The original purpose of Internet was to enable sharing of information. For example, if a scholarly paper existed on a server at University of California, and a professor at Oxford wanted to read it, Internet made that instantly possible. Now, if Oxford professor had a paper that referenced information from UC paper, they could link directly to that other document rather than just quoting from it. So a hyperlink was intended as a way of connecting data, ideas, and references together. It’s like saying, “if you’d like further information on this topic, here’s a place to find it.”

When Google search engine was created, its developers took this into account. And drew conclusion that a link was an indication that page being linked to was relevant to some particular subject-matter.

So that’s a rather long introduction to a short answer to your question. Web sites need links because they send traffic that’s already targeted to their subject matter to other sites, and because they help search engines determine both their theme and what web as a community deems their importance to be. Basically (although not absolutely), more links that point to a page, more relevant that page is determined to be. In addition, links are now considered most reliable way (apart from paying) to get a site into search engines in first place.

While both Google and Yahoo allow you to submit a site to their index, it’s clear that best way to get search engines to pay attention to your site is to get a page that their spiders already know about to link to yours. The spiders then follow that link to your site, and add it to their index.

Julia: Thanks, Bob. But there are different types of links aren't there? Can you explain differences?

Bob: As we discussed in previous question, there are text links from other sites. Some of these are reciprocal (that is, they link to you and you link back to them) and others are one-way (the owner of other site decides, for whatever reason, to link to your site and doesn’t expect you to link back).There are also image links: banners, buttons, etc. These have advantage of standing out visually from rest of page, but many people have become immune to standard banner ad and just ignore them, because it’s assumed they’re just advertisements, and as such, not necessarily relevant to page on which they appear.

Then there are directory listings, where a link to your site appears on a page containing links to numerous other sites in what directory editor has determined to be your particular niche.

An important thing to consider regarding getting a link is code behind it. If your primary concern is to send traffic to your site, this isn’t important. In that case, what you need to think about is whether link is going to send right people to you. But if you want link to be recognized by search engines and to contribute to your ranking in searches, you need link to be in simple HTML, without JavaScript or other code that will hide link from search engine spiders.

There are also links that won’t help you at all, or will put you in danger of losing your position on search engines. Guestbook spam, practice of going to a site’s guest book area and posting a message like “Nice site. Come visit mine, at…” will do you no good. The search engines know that such links carry no value, and just ignore them. The same is true for free-for-all links pages, on which you can immediately add a link to any site, without any editorial oversight.

Link farms are a far more dangerous subject. These are networks of sites that are heavily cross-linked and offer to link to you as long as you link back into network, or host a page on your site that serves as a directory of sites that link farm has linked to. The idea here is to abuse power search engines give to links by exponentially increasing number of links to your site, without regard for theme or value. You link into farm, and you have hundreds, perhaps thousands of links pointing back to you. But links are only there to increase link popularity. The sites on which links reside are not intended to actually be viewed by people; they’re just intended to give search engine spiders mistaken impression that your site is extraordinarily popular.

Julia: So, what's best way to get legitimate and relevant sites to link to yours?

Bob: Before you can get a site to link to yours, you first have to find it. You need to do research on subject-matter of your site by searching on keywords you hope people will use to find it. The results of those searches will give you a list of sites that are already performing well for those keywords. You should then study those sites, so that you can write to webmaster and request a link in such a way that demonstrates that you understand purpose of their site. And give reasons as to why you think their audience will find your site of interest.

You can buy links from sites as well, sometimes on a single page, and sometimes all across site. These are just like any other form of advertising. So before you part with your money you need to determine if they’re worth purchase price by deciding if they’ll send you enough of right traffic. That’s why sites that offer opportunity to buy links will make claims about how much traffic they get and how their audience is made up of “decision makers.”

If you're using an analyzer to optimize web pages for keyword density and you should, it's important to measure keyword density to see if right figure's achieved. When using a keyword density analyzer how do you know if analyzer's giving right density & what's right density anyway ?

I set about trying 5 analyzer's on 5 different pages ranked from position 1 to 30 on Google.com. I wanted to see how important keyword density was to ranking order and find right figure.

If you don't know what keyword density is, it's number of keyword's divided by word count on page expressed as a percentage. So, 20 keyword's on a page with a total word count of 500 should be 20/500 or a keyword density of 4%. As we'll see, it's not quite so simple.

A keyword density of between 2% to 20% for a page is often quoted as a target figure. Personally I think at 20% you would be regarded by search engine as spamming (to much repetition) for which you could find your site penalised. It would also not make very interesting reading.

It might seem obvious to say, but there are only two ways to get higher keyword density. One is more frequent use of keyword or phrase, other is having fewer words.

It's only when using an analyzer to look at keyword density, you start to realise how difficult & time consuming it can be to reach keyword density figures of 4 to 5% never mind anything higher. Reducing words on a page often seems like easier answer to improving density.

Some optimizer's believe that some search engines look at word count as well as density. It then adds a weighting factor against a page with a low count, compared to say another page with same density but a higher word count.

But is it true, or a theory and what's an acceptable word count ?

A well known and respected analyzer that many optimizer's use, for Google.com recommended a total word count of 505 to 795 with 436 to 629 words in body text.

I carried out an experiment on Google.com running a query on exact phrase "keyword density" and then used a keyword density analyzer to determine density & word count for chosen pages in Google rankings.

Each page was stored to hard drive to ensure software was analyzing same page each time. For exact phrase "keyword density" there were 55,100 other competing pages on Google.

Keyword Density on total page

The table this section refers to is at: Table 1

In keyword density column 1st figure is for "keyword" and in brackets for "density". Only position 30 complies with analyzers recommended total word count!

From keyword density analyzer results it's clear No.1 position is not being significantly penalised for only having a word count of 161 and neither is No.10 with 102 words when compared to others.

Interestingly No.10 & 19 positions have almost identical keyword density, still with low word count, but one with lower count gets higher ranking.

We know keyword density is not only factor to determine page rank. What about keywords in Meta Tags and link text and main body content ?

For Google keyword and description Meta Tags are supposed to be ignored. However a recent report by Jon Ricerca of www.searchenginegeek.com entitled "Does Keywords Metatag Affect SE Ranking?" would seem to suggest that might not be true.

In first part of this article, Meta Tag's don't seem to matter since No.1 posn does not have them!

Next, a keyword in visible link text and 2nd in actual link URL to a page, href part.

From Keyword Density Analyzer, Posn 1 has keyword's in link text, but so do No's 19 & 30. No's 4 & 10 don't have keyword's in link text.

Posn 1 also has a keyword in link, but again so do No's 19 & 30 and both 4 & 10 don't.

Also on positions 10 & 19, No.10 beats 19 even though it has no keywords in link text or link.

So far, No.10 beats No.19 even though they have almost same keyword density. No 10 has a lower word count and no keywords in either link text or link compared to No 19 which has both. So what's missing factor/s that explain why No 19 has a lower ranking than No 10 when by optimizer rules it should be other way around.

It's nothing to do with keywords in title either, because they all have those.

What about keywords in Alt tags, no its' not that either, only one that has those is No.4.

I do hope your following this so far !