Search Engine Optimization: For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14. Using Link Popularity to Boost Your Position

In This Chapter

• Understanding how search engines calculate value

• Building Web site hubs

• Weighing pages with TrustRank

• Using keywords in links

• Identifying links that aren't links

Thousands of site owners have experienced the frustration of being unable to get search engines to index their sites. You build a Web site, you do your best to optimize it for search engines, you register in the search engines, and then nothing much happens. Little or no traffic turns up at your site, your pages don't rank well in the search engines, and in some cases, you can't even find your pages in the search engines. What's going on?

Here's the opposite scenario: You have an existing site and find a few other sites to link to it. You make no changes to the pages themselves, yet all of a sudden, you notice your pages jump up in the search engines.

There's a lot of confusion about links and their relationship to Web sites. Most site owners don't even realize that links have a bearing on their search engine positions. Surely, all you need to do is register your page in a search engine and it will be indexed, right? Nope. This chapter takes the confusion out of links by showing you how they can help, and what you need to know to make them work.

Why Search Engines Like Links

A few years ago, pretty much all you had to do to get your site listed in a search engine — and maybe even ranked well — was register with the search engine. Then along came Google in 1998 ...