Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Text links to your site can be a very powerful tool in order to improve your search engine ranking. As taken from Google’s technology page:

In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

What they do not tell you is how this whole voting works within the link itself. Since no one outside of Google has the algorithm on hand. Let’s make some educated guesses as to how this might work.

Scenario 1:
A link from page A to page B in the form of:

From Page A - Go to this link: http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html

Results of Scenario 1:
The pagerank for Page B increases by 1 Google Unit or “Goonit” since they received one vote via the anchor link. It does not benefit Page B in terms of keyword association via the Google Search algorithm since most people will probably not search for “http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html” in Google’s search bar.

Scenario 2:
A link from page A to page B in the form of:

From Page A - Go to this link and learn about chickens (where chickens links to http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html)

Results of Scenario 2:
Again, Page B increases by a Goonit, but now we have the anchor text “chickens” associated with the page: http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html. So when someone searches for “chickens” in Google’s search bar, they are more likely to see http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html than a non-chicken referenced page.

Scenario 3:
A link from page A to page B in the form of:

From Page A - Go to this link and learn about chickens (where chickens links to http://www.pageb.com/chickens.html)

Results of Scenario 3:
Again, Page B increases by a Goonit, we have the anchor text “chickens” associated with the page and the landing page has “chickens” directly in the url. Everything is coming together. The only thing left to do is make sure that the title and body text of http://www.pageb.com/chickens.html mentions chickens and the world will be at peace.

So how do I become #1 in Google rankings? Rinse and repeat my friends, rinse and repeat. By having good content, people will link to it. And by having a savvy marketing team, SEO, or web designer, you can tailor pages, titles, keywords, etc. to match your industry search terms. If you have further relationships with other sites, you can get them to link to your site and vice versa, however, avoid reciprocal linking schemes as those are a quick route to the Google graveyard. It makes sense if you refer back to Google’s technology page. If Page A votes for Page B and Page B votes for Page A, those votes nullify each other and you are essentially treading water.

Let me know if I forgot anything.