Putting Links into Context
I got an email this morning asking about linking to websites and how different ways of doing so affect Google rankings. Search engine optimization (often called SEO) is a huge topic covering all sorts of things about online presence, but one of the easiest first steps to improving your PageRank is to make your links prominent and relevant.
Let’s say you’ve always dreamed of being an interior decorator, so you start a blog about how you’re decorating your new apartment in your free time. You write posts about specific changes you make to your apartment as they happen. Your posts will be incredibly relevant to the topic at hand (i.e. picking an apartment color scheme or using zebra-print shower curtains as living room accessories), but you’re just a hobbyist, so your blog probably won’t have everything everyone’s ever wanted to know about interior decoration.
If you try to optimize your search engine rankings around a broad topic like interior decorating, you’ll have a really hard time getting very high up in searches, since there are already millions of results on Google, and hundreds or thousands of those are probably maintained by professionals whose job it is to stay relevant and be well-known. But if you try to optimize your rankings around things that don’t have so many people vying for those spots but that others could still find useful or interesting, you’ll be easier to find when people do look for the information you’ve posted.
When people then find your blog and link to it saying “I just found the best orange footrest cubes I’ve ever seen” their link to your post on orange footrest cubes will make you seem more like an authority figure on the topic of orange footrest cubes. Your search engine rankings will increase based on that context and more people will start to find your blog in even more searches.
But don’t start posting links to your blog everywhere you can, just to get more links. Search engines have started to become wise to link spam and are starting to do a pretty good job of filtering out irrelevant links. The best way to link to yourself is to write meaningful comments with links directly to the most relevant post, and to do so in places that already have high rankings on similar topics. Use words to describe where the link leads (saying “click here for the best website ever” doesn’t give the link enough context to explain why it should be followed, but “I love this post! You did a great job explaining the differences between footrests that are circles and ones that are cubes. It reminds me of the post I wrote a couple of months ago when I bought my own orange footrest cubes. We have so much in common!”).
That helps people, and search engines, find what they’re looking for.
