Understanding the role of links in Website Marketing - Part 1

Having quality links is the greatest factor in achieving "good ranking" for your targeted keywords. Good ranking actually means coming up high on the Search Engine Result Page . And hence links are major players in Search Engine Optimization .

But what do you mean by quality links? What is a newbie website owner to do to get quality links so that he can come up high on the SERPS? Link to who? Links from where? Links by who? What kinds of links are there? What are text links, image links, incoming links, outgoing links, internal links...? Whew !

Also, there are link exchanges, paid links, 2 way links, 3 way links, manufactured links, automated links, Stolen links(spam links). Have you heard about link barter, link love, link juice, link share, deep links etc...? The list seems so large that can scare any new-comer to the online marketing world give up out of frustration.

But don't worry! It's actually very simple. As long as you understand the basics of how the Internet works, understanding links will be quite easy. It will also help to understand how the search engines work and what they want from you. So let us see how the world wide web is organized.

How the Internet is organized: 
Each individual web-page forms a "location" on the web. That means every URL(technical term : Universal Resource Locator) is a location.You see, a URL is a just a locator that points to a resource on the web.

Note: A resource need not necessarily be a web page; even though most often it points to a web-page. It could be many things such as file that you can download, an application that you can use, a video or audio file that starts playing etc.

Each location on the internet may be connected by a link. You can connect to other pages within your web-site or other web-sites via links. In fact you can say that the world-wide-web would just have been world-wide-pages if not for the links. Imagine having to type in the full URL of this page on the address bar so that you could read this article. It would have been tedious at best.

Some pages are grouped together in the form of domains. Domains may be sub-divided into sub domains. For eg. adwords.google.com and images.google.com are both subdomains of the google.com domain. Once you go to google.com, there may be some way you can navigate to the different sub-domains of the site.

Technically speaking, links are objects that act as pointers to other locations on the web. Sometimes they point to a different place on the same page. The web is possible because people as well as search engines can traverse the world wide web by simply following the links.

Technical Explanation:

Here is what makes up a link.
<a href="" onclick="" title="" > Anchor text here. </a>

• A refers to the anchor tag.
• The href attribute takes the value of the web-page or resource the link is connecting to.
• The title attribute takes a text descritpion. When using Internet Explorer, the title tag is displayed when the user hovers over the link.
• The onclick attribute takes the name of a javascript method as its value. This method is executed when the user clicks the link. It is also possible to cancel out the redirection action by writing code within the javascript method.
• The style attribute can be used to change the appearance (and behavior) of the anchor tag.
• The target attribute takes ‘_blank’ value which means the new page will open in a new browser window.

Other attributes like ‘rev’, ‘rel’ , ‘hreflang’ , ‘target’ etc are not of great importance.

Links may be text or image or even video based but they all work because of a programming object called the "Anchor" tag.
Here is an example where the link points to a page that gives you further explanation about using links. Links and Search Engine Optimization

Here is another example where the anchor tag is used around an image to convert it to a link. In effect the image becomes the linked object.

In the place of the above image, you may use any other object such as a div, span etc. Whatever you put inside the anchor tags become clickable. So, now that we have established that links are really quite important, lets take a look at how the Search Engines use them.