Everyone knows that inbound links to your website are a good thing. Everyone also knows that some are better for you than others. But how do you tell exactly how much more valuable one link is over another?

Knowing exactly which link partners you should pursue first, and which ones ones are not worth your time can save you an incredible amount of effort.

Assuming that the link we are speaking of is a text link, and not some weird Java script or other link that search engines cannot follow, the following factors can help you formulate a plan:

What is the PageRank of the PAGE where that link will exist?
Remember, PageRank is assigned by PAGE, and not by website, so be certain you look up the PageRank of the particular page or your link will reside. This establishes a frame of reference by using a generally accepted measurement criteria. While may change at some point in the future, but for now, it’s PageRank that’s the indicator.

What is the total total number of links on that page pointing to other pages?
You can determine this by searching Google for link:domain.com, Which will show you, all of the inbound links to that domain, and you can use Yahoo site explorer to show “Inlinks”. (MSN inbound links do not matter, and MSN has even disabled the ability to look those up)

It’s a generally accepted fact among SEO experts that each page may “pass along” approximately 85% of its total PageRank or total “link juice” to all of the other pages it links to.

Obviously, this means the value of each outbound link is diminished as the number increases, so the less links you have on an outbound page, the more “link juice” each of them has to pass along. See?

What is the number of EXTERNAL links on that page pointing to other domains?
The value passed along for each outbound link from a page changes, whether that outbound link is to an internal page on the site, or to an external page on another domain. At this writing, nobody seems to know that exact figure in the algorithm, and I am choosing not to guess here.

What is the total number of inbound links pointing to that page?
The more inbound links any page has, and the more valuable it is, and the more likely it is to remain a valuable partner, because the inadvertent loss of a few good inbound links is likely to not do it any damage.

What is the number of inbound links pointing to that page from domains besides their own?
Websites can take advantage of their own PageRank and number of pages to increase their own number of inbound links. (for you technical types, there is a great post explaining this on Jim Boykin’s blog)

Since we know that external links are more valuable than your own internal links, this has to be considered when determining which links to go after.

At this point in your research, Yahoo site Explorer makes this easier, so use it and choose the option under inlinks to show “links to this domain” from domains other than it’s own.

What is the anchor text of those inbound link to your domain?
An inbound link has more value if the text is a relevant key phrase, an even more valuable if that key phrase is used in the title tag, H1 tag, and body text of the URL being linked to. If the inbound link text meets all of that a criteria, then it has the most value.

This would explain why the number one search result for the phrase “click here” is likely to always be Adobe Acrobat reader, because there are so many inbound links from reputable sites using that text.

Going to the individual webpages of your competitions Inlinks is a ridiculous process that takes an incredible amount of time, but if you are in a highly competitive market, then you have no choice.

While researching, save all of the your results of your research into columns on a spreadsheet, and you will end up with highly sortable list.

There are some web-based tools to make this process run a little faster, and my favorite compilation of SEO tools is here at SEO Book

Here are some ideas for creating inbound links in my educational area for beginning SEO tips

Google keeps adding things all the time, and with this one, they’ve made an excellent addition that can be very helpful. You should use it to identify weakly “linked to” areas of your website.

Go to your Google Webmaster tools account and log in

Notice there’s now a fourth option tab called “Links” between the “Statistics” and “Sitemaps” tabs. You’ll see two options there, “Internet” or “External”.

External provides a complete list of pages on your domain that have links pointing to them from other sites, and then gives a hyperlink to the list for each page.
Internal gives you a list of pages on your domain that have links pointing to them from your own internal pages and then a hyperlink to the list for each page.

How cool is that? I’d say, real cool, since you can instantly spot weak areas, and react accordingly, (at least internally).

Many experts have long been pointing out that your own internal links can be nearly as valuable as ones from external domains, and I think the fact that this chart is provided here proves that theory.

ooking at either area you can see the need to “spread the wealth” and start linking to other areas of your website.

It’s going to take some time and effort, but you’d better get on it, because your competition probably is…

In no particular order, here are the most important things I was either reminded of, learned, or remember from Pubcon.

1. Always strive for perfection, but don’t wait for it before implementation, or you may never get your projects completed, your product ready, or your web pages uploaded, etc. In his keynote speech, Guy Kawasaki said one of his mantras is, “Don’t Worry, be Crappy!”. I’ve always believed this (to a degree), and it was nice to hear the reinforcement.
2. Experts don’t always agree. A funny situation spanned two sessions. First, during the Dream Team Site Review session, Todd Freisen said “There’s never a good reason to do a 302 redirec. In the final presentation, “Search Engine Smackdown” from the show, Peter Linsley from Ask.com had a Powerpoint presentation. One of his slides was “Proper use of A 302 redirect”. Peter had obviously attended the earlier session, because when he came to that slide, he quickly skipped over it with no comment, emitting a chuckle from those in the audience that were paying attention.
3. Buying too many links is bad and will cause penalization of a website in the search rankings. I suppose I’ve known this for a while, but it really hit home when I heard Thomas Bindl’s portion of a link buying presentation. Yes, a site can be penalized for buying “run of site” links, or for having too high a percentage of their inbound links be purchased, or for participating in link farms or cross linking schemes. This same presentation also included Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads, and he too stressed the importance of not buying too many. All the presenters stressed that it’s important to keep a balance between your paid and organic links, and Thomas Bindl actually suggested that buying ANY links was a bad thing, even ones from co-panelist Patrick Gavin. Matt Cutts also said last year that buying links can’t help your ranking, but this year it was made clear that it can hurt them too.
4. Alt tags still matter. This was said not only by a panelist, who mentioned their use, but was also confirmed by an SEO I met from Kansas City. He works frequently on a financial site, where they cannot make ANY text changes without a $140 per page submission to the SEC. He noticed that adding keyword rich ALT text to his images did improve his rankings. That’s why I stand by their continued inclusion in my “Top 10 SEO Tips“ article, despite the fact that most experts claim they’re worthless today. When used properly, they’re still a piece of the pie.
5. Don’t link to bad neighborhoods. If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard this, I’d be a wealthy guy, but do I listen? Not always… Search your website and visit your link partners. Do they all offer a quality experience? Are they all directly related to your industry? Is there a legitimate reason for you to link there? If not, remove them ASAP. Improve the quality of your outbound links, remove the junk, and your rankings will improve
6. Don’t show search engines session ID strings in your URL’s. Again, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but it was a strong takeaway for me because I specifically found out why. Last year, some search engines were still having trouble indexing dynamic URL’s. This year, they’ve gotten quite good at it, but that can still lead to other problems. If session ID strings are given to a search spider one day, then the next time it comes back, the same page provides a different ID, this can lead to duplicate content issues. It’s important to have programmers provide for this in their code, and set the store up so that if a visitor will not accept a cookie, (like a spider) then the URL will not include the session ID.
7. RSS feeds are going to take over the world. Nobody actually said this, but I can sure see it coming. Already, IE7 will display an RSS feed in a much more user friendly way. Personally, I read blogs and articles through an RSS reader, and seldom visit the actual websites of my favorite authors any more. Last year, products began to trickle in to the market that helped publishers put advertisements right into their feeds. I think I realized this last year, when I put an RSS aggregator on my Palm Treo cell phone. But it was during this conference that I really began to believe that traditional websites might already be dead, and we just don’t realize it yet.
8. Everything goes on your permanent record. During site reviews, it seemed that the first thing Matt Cutts did was to research what other domain names might be owned by the site owner, and then he would visit those domains as well, ultimately questioning the reasons for their existence. Why should it matter to Google what else I do in another domain, or if I have a bunch of domains parked? Well, I guess it does, and got the strong impression that you’d better not have anything they don’t like on any of your property.
9. Resolving the www and the non www versions of a domain to the same place has been sort of an advanced seo secret for a long time, but at the last two Pubcons, I didn’t hear it mentioned in the review sessions. This year however, not a single domain that I saw got reviewed without looking at (and recommending) that 301 redirect for the non www version.
10. 24 hours of unlimited internet access ends when you check out. Some late night activities (official of course) on Thursday kept me from renewing my daily internet access at my hotel Friday morning until about 11 am. Then, Saturday morning, I checked out early, knowing that I had access until I had to leave for the airport at 11. WRONG! It seems that by checking out about 9, I lost my access, and had to pay again just to use it for the last couple of hours before my flight.

Even though there were a few early disappointments, with a 45 minute registration line, and a couple of presenters that didn’t quite have it together, I thought the conference was great, and there’s no question I’ll return in 2007. I met a lot of people, learned some valuable information, and I consider it to be the one of my best educational investments of 2006.

Looking at my notes, I see there are more than 10, so maybe I’ll expand it to the top 20 when I have more time… If you attended Pubcon, what other things stick in your mind?

When I took my first Search Engine Workshop class with John Alexander and Robin Nobles, Ginette Degner taught a session of the class. Since then, each time I’ve returned to SEW, I learned something insightful from her.

She’s written a great article here called “10 ways to increase traffic and sales” that you might need to read as a reminder.

Besides wanting to point out a great article, I wanted to add an 11th item to her list…

11. Write and post usefull articles and information on your own website that is so good, that people will link to you because they want to.

There’s no substitute for great content, because once you have it, links will come and so will ranking.

Once all is said and done, and the site is structurally sound, it’s being spidered regularly, it has decent analytics, visitor statistics etc. then it’s all about one thing…  Making it the single best resource on the planet for your chosen search phrase.

That’s it, there’s not much left to say!

Google’s finally done another backlink update over the weekend, and as of Saturday, yourinbound link numbers should show a healthy increase.

Go to Google and search for “site:yourdomain.com” (without the quotes) and you will not get a list of every webpage that links to you, but you will get every page that Google is counting, and that’s what really matters.

If your number of inbound links isn’t on the rise, you need to get busy, pronto. How can you build your inbound links?

If you get creative with your content, then good inbound links will start coming your way eventually. It’s just a matter of time, but can you afford to wait it out?
Once you have a linkworthy site, you should seek out good potential linking websites, and send them an introductory email pointing out your site. Explaining how it can bring value to their visitors, and why they should link to you.
Then you politely bug the webmaster incessantly until you actually get them to link to your site, or they tell you to go away. You might even follow up with a phone call!
Who has the time for that? I certainly don’t, and neither do most business owners. It’s gruelling, frustrating, and time consuming work, but I’ve found some people that are pretty good at it.

Each week, you’re provided with a spread sheet of the developed links to verify, and that’s all there is to it. It’s a great way to get links without doing all the hard work yourself.

If you already have a decent website, then you should consider buying permanent one way inbound links to jumpstart your business.