Though some people will tell you that search engine optimization is one of the dark arts of the Internet, it is not. Every search engine has to use what information it can to accurately rank each website.
The way they achieve this is really based on two key things, how your page looks to them, combined with all the information that they can gather about your site from all around the Web. They basically gather this information together as a popularity contest in that the way they rank you in their results is based on how many links there are all over the Web from other sites, pointing at yours. The site with the most links, basically wins.
It’s actually far more complicated than that, but that’s the general gist of it. The reason it’s far more complicated is because links are not all worth the same. The value of a link can depend on several factors, like the PR (pagerank) of a particular site or page, the title of the site or page, the subtitles on the page, the actual clickable text of your link, whether or not you link back to them etc. there are far too many factors to list here, but there are a few.
It is an achievable feat to be ranked higher that a site with 4000 links with only 400-500 links pointing at your website, as long as they are better links based on the criteria of that search engine’s algorithm. As these search engines become more and more complex, the link quality criteria is getting stricter and stricter.
In a perfect world, your backlink ( the link on another site back to yours ) should have the following ingredients; it should be on a site with a related similar topic to your own, on a page with a title related to the search term that you wish to rank highly for, below a heading that again is related to your keyword, the link text should be your keyword that you are wanting to rank well for, I cant stress this highly enough, keyword as the link text is vital.
It would be much better for you if you could receive these links without having to link back because that would make the link a one-way link as opposed to a two-way or reciprocal link which are worth a lot less in the eyes of the search engines.
You should change the keyword that you’re using for your link text every fifty or so links. This is because search engines have developed filters that can see if anyone has too many link to their site that say exactly the same thing, which looks unnatural to them.
I would recommend adding a maximum of one hundred link a month to try and stay within the limitations of the search engines. If the links are of a good quality as described, then it should be doing wonders of good for your website.
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