In this article we are going to be looking at the perfect link. What kind of links do you want pointing to your site? Of course, you cannot always get what you want, but in this article I will tell you what you should be aiming for.
First of all you should aim to get text links rather than image links. I would take an image link over no link, because even if I can't get keywords into my links, the link still provides some value, such as passing thorough page rank. But the ideal is the text link, so that you can use anchor text keywords to tell the search engines what the reference page is all about.
If you have too many keyword links then you are Google bombing your site. Of course, the text needs to contain useful keywords, not 'click here', you company name or URL, but rather the keywords that you want to rank well for. You can always add a title attribute to the tag of your wish but this might not make any difference.
Where should this link be placed? Well first of all it needs to be on a webpage that is actually indexed by the search engines. If the page is not indexed then that link has no value. But that does not mean that you should refuse links on pages that are not yet indexed. If the page is very new for instance, then it might be indexed soon. In fact one technique that used to be popular was to figure out which links to your site are on non-indexed pages then get those pages indexed by linking to them from other already indexed pages.
Anyway, as far as the ideal link goes it needs to be on an indexed page. Now what kind of site do you want your link placed on? There is a great deal of talk about relevance in the SEO business. And while I am sure it has some importance I believe that it can be over rated. The idea is that a link from a related site is more valuable from a link on a non-related site. As an example, a link to your olive oil website is more valuable when it comes from a cooking site or some kind of food site rather than say from a blog about history.
This might be true to some degree, however it is completely untrue that a link from a non-related site holds no value as some people may suggest. I will take a well key worded link from anywhere I can get it. Relevant is the ideal but not one hundred percent essential.
Let us also not forget about trust. As we are building the ideal link, the very best link that we can, might as well put it on a well trusted site. Perhaps, a major newspaper website or the website owned by a highly respected university. An .edu domain is thought to carry extra weight in the search engines as do .gov domain names.
Our ideal link will also be on a high PageRank webpage. Now PageRank is a measure of value, so since we are dreaming about the perfect link right now, we may as well get that link from the page with the highest PageRank as possible. The link also needs to be on a reasonable portion of the page. For example if a page is pulling content from another source using JavaScript and your link is within that content, it may not be read.
Actually Google can read JavaScript and sometimes does but quite likely not all the time. It does for instance read the content in Facebook pages that is being pulled in using JavaScript. That does not mean it reads all such content on all sites thorough. So I believe the ideal link is one on static text that has been loaded into a webpage by the web server not the web browser.
Where within a page is ideal? Preferably within content rather than in a list of links, again I would take a link anywhere on the page rather than having no link. But links embedded into paragraphs are likely to be more valuable than links in a big list. The theory is that links in paragraphs tend to be surrounded by other related words. The search engines may see these related keywords as associated with the link so giving it more value.
On the other hand it is not a bad thing to get a link in a blog's blog roll, for instance. As then you end up getting a link from every page in the blog. I think it is fair to say it is better to have one hundred links from one hundred different sites rather than having one hundred links from one single site. However it is also better to have one hundred links from one site rather than just one link from that site.
A hundred links from a single site is not hundred times the value of a single link from that site. But I am sure it is worth more than just one link. As far as where to put a link on a page goes, perhaps there really is no ideal rather it is good to get a variety.
To summarise then what is the ideal link? It is a text link with good keywords in the anchor text with the possibility of a title attribute if you think that is important. It will be on an indexed page from a relevant site and ensuring it is from a trusted site with a high page rank. The link should be a static text and not dynamically created and getting the link into paragraph text is a good although a variety is desirable.
About Author: Sadhiv Mahandru has been developing websites and optimising them for over a decade. Specialising in SEO UK. You can learn more about Internet Marketing and SEO by reading my personal blog.