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The Power of Links

You may not know this but links have become one of the most important weapons in the armory of the SEO specialist, why you may ask, well here is an example I have been using for a few years now.

Search for the term ‘click here’ in Google, and you will find the ‘Adobe Acrobat’ download page as the number one result, even though the page doesn’t mention the phrase ‘click here’ or the words once. This is because many websites use PDF downloads with a link to Adobe Acrobat – usually saying to download Acrobat Reader ‘click here’. So how does this happen and what does it mean.

There are two parts to this. Firstly the text click here is used as the link, referred to as link text and used by Google to match the link text to the content of the website.

But this doesn’t explain the click here scenario as there is no mention of it on the Adobe Reader website. For years people have spoken about the value of content, so if the Adobe Acrobat website doesn’t mention or talk about ‘click here’ why is it ranked first?

Here’s how it works. Someone once described the internet as one big voting system, the more votes you have the more popular you are, see links it to your website as a vote and you can see that the more links you have the more popular you are. Google likes popular websites so ranks them higher than others for specific phrases even if the website doesn’t have the content on their website.

Now unless you know millions of website owners who can put a one way link to your website with the link text of your choosing, it will be a little more difficult to get rankings purely on link text alone – it has been done for terms such as miserable failure for the White House website when George W Bush was president and is often referred to as Google Bombing.

Links are very powerful, there is little doubt about that. However at the end of the day, if the content of your website isn’t useful (Adobe Reader), or the subject of interest to a large number of people (George W Bush) then you are unlikely to have enough people to vote for (link to) you to make a difference.

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