Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 7:51 pm | by Adam
As you know, if you have a website, then Search Engine Optimization “SEO” can seem a little overwhelming. As this is the buzz word on the web – SEO companies can and do charge an arm and a leg for their techniques, tips and tricks to help you improve your rank inside the major search engines. “Experts” will talk about “on page and off page”, “fresh content,” “algorithms,” “blogs,” “twitter,” etc. – and yet, the most powerful technique and what you should be spending your time and money on is getting a variety of back links. What are back links? Well, to put it simply – they are return links (direct links from another site to your site) to your website from other websites, directories, blogs, forums, etc., to your URL. For example, inside Sandiegorestaurantweek.com, each of you have a profile page with a place for your website URL. If this is complete, you will have a direct back link to your website’s URL. This is called a reciprocal back link and is a very good and valuable thing. Why? Well, major search engine results depend heavily on them for ranking. Page Rank (or where you fall on the search engine results page) is based on algorithms calculating three major things: Compliance or Friendliness of Site Code, Traffic, and Back links. Back links have the most weight but their value is not based on quantity but rather quality. Think of it as a democratic system: PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
In other words, PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page, there is no support for that page.
