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Links
A website of any reasonable size should have links internally (to other parts of the site) as well as external inbound and outbound links (to and from other sites on the Web). Site links are appealing to the search engines because they suggest that the site is robust in its content. However, it’s important that your links are useful and relevant, or they could appear to be spam.
Internal links should be keywords or keyword phrases that are consistent with the keywords of the target page. If a link goes from one page to another with the link text "new homes," the search engine will crawl the target page to look for the phrase "new homes" within its content.
Search engines consider outbound external text links to be highly relevant, so important keywords and keyword phrases should be targeted in every link title. External outbound links are also considered to be a sign of expertise and appear "natural" to the spiders. Is it likely that a legitimate Beatles site would have all the Beatles information in the world, or is it more likely that it would link to other Beatles sites that may have different specializations? Certainly, no one website has all the relevant information on any topic, so it makes sense that legitimate sites will link to other external sites. That’s why the search engines consider external links so important.
Search engines consider inbound external text links to be the most important, however. They are a "vote" from one site to another; if another site has chosen to link to yours, it is telling its visitors that your site has relevant and useful information. In the past, the site with the most votes would win and be ranked the highest. Because of "link spamming" techniques, however, the sheer number of links is no longer the most important factor in determining your ranking. In most cases, the quality of your links will outrank quantity. Search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated and their indexes have become large enough to view linking in different ways, and to adjust their rankings accordingly. Search engines can see if an inbound link to your music website is from another music web site or from a UFO website, and will adjust the value given to the link accordingly. Search engines can also tell if your links have come from distributed link farms or reciprocal linking circles; if they are, they will devalue the inbound links accordingly. Links are important, but relevance is always the most important factor in search engine optimization.
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