SEO Linking Terms
Ten Important SEO Linking Terms
For Strong SEO Performance You Need to Know Them
If you have a website or blog and you want it to be found in search then you’ll need to know some of the key terms related to search engine optimization.
Here are 10 SEO linking terms that I think anyone with a website or blog needs to know.
1. Backlink: A backlink is also known and in in-coming link or simply a link. This is a hyperlink on another website or blog which points to your website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they act as votes-in-favor of your content (your website or blog) and the major search engines count the number of backlinks and the more you have versus your competition the more positive impact they will have relative to influencing search engine rankings.
2. PageRank: PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The higher the page rank the more valuable the page is in the eyes of the search engines. Page rank is important in linking because you will want to gain backlinks from relevant pages with higher rather that lower page rank. The page rank scale established by Google spans from 0 to 10 and the higher the better.
3. Linkbait: A linkbait is a piece of web content published on a website or blog with the goal of attracting as many backlinks as possible. Remember that the more backlinks (in general) the better for search position.
A classic example of linkbait are the “Top 10? lists such as this blog post.
4. Link Farm: A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the “hopeful” purpose of artificially increasing the position of the sites gaining links from the “farm”. This practice no longer works and link farms need to be totally avoided.
5. Anchor Text: The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a real estate blog that is associated with Hanover, New Hampshire, for example, it would help your search rankings if some of your backlinks had “real estate” or “real estate in Hanover” as their linking anchor text.
6. Generic Link: This is a link made with generic text such as “read more” or “visit website” or “click here”. These links provide value in and of themselves and to have a proper ratio of generic links to keyword phrase links is important.
7. NoFollow: The no-follow is a link attribute used by website owners to signal to Google that they don’t endorse the website being linked to. This attribute is important when the link is a paid links such as a links from advertisements. When Google and the other major search engines see the no-follow attribute it will not count that link and a no-follow link will not help search position.
8. Link Profile: This is the sum total of the impact of all links going into a website. In fact every page has an individual link profile. A link profile is based on:
- The number and quality of in-coming links
- The ratio of generic linking phrases to keyword phrases
- The number of image-based links (no text)
- The page on a site that is being linked to
- The quality of the site providing the link
- The relevancy of the page providing the link
9. Canonical URL: A canonical URL, therefore, is the preferred URL for accessing a specific page of content within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.
It is important to get links to your canonical URLs.
10. Deep Linking: Deep linking are links that go to deep content on your website. Not all links should go to the home page. In fact if links only go the home page then this sends a signal that the deeper content is not valuable. It means that no one really explores the site and even if they did they did not find anything of value to link to. You need to gain deep links to create a strong link profile.
Here is another blog post from the SEO Notebook on another SEO Linking Term – this time on organic linking.
Also, I did not want to leave out Link Velocity but did want to limit the post to ten items so here is a link to an SEO Notebook post on Link Velocity.
About Gary Horsman