Link Development Strategy

What is Link Development? Do I Need to Use This Type of Strategy?

Link development is a web site promotion strategy to increase your web site's Google PageRank. PageRank (PR) is a measure of your web site's relative "importance" based on the number and quality of links from other web pages. Any link can send valuable traffic to your web site, but let's focus on building PR in this discussion.

Is Quantity What Matters? Should I Get as Many Incomming Links as Possible?

More links to your web site from other web pages, commonly called incoming links, means more Internet traffic and higher PR. Don't limit yourself to requesting links to your home page only. Any of your pages or articles may receive incoming links and pass PR to the rest of your web site. The relevance of links to your web site doesn't factor into your PR value, but it's still an important consideration. Even with a high PR, your web site will not get a favorable position in the search engine result pages (SERPs) if your links are primarily off-topic. Focus on getting links from web pages that are related to, but do not directly compete with your web site.

Is There Such a Thing as Quality Over Quantity in Terms of Incomming Links?

Google seems to give preference to some links more than others. Which are good and which aren't? It's anybody's guess. Google likes to keep their ranking and PR information a mystery to prevent abuse. To see some (not all) of the incoming links you have, use the "link:" command. Type link:http://www.yoursite.com in the search box. In Google, you will see a random sampling of some of your incomming links. Yahoo shows a more complete list.

What About Internal Links? Do They Play a Strategic Role?

Any page on your web site can have PR and each page has it's own value. Don't forget to look for links to your internal web pages as well. These pages link to each other and bolster PR throughout the web site. This is another way that content plays a role. A greater number of content pages provide a greater potential for internal PR to be distributed.