Pear Analytics

There are several types of inbound links a website can get, each with a different value associated with them.  Here we will explore a few of them:

Contextual

A contextual inbound link is usually a one-way link that appears to be the most natural, and therefore has the most value.  This is a link pointing to you within the body text of another website, and links to you with descriptive text.  This could be a blog post, news article or other.

Sidebar

A sidebar link is one that appears in the sidebar of a page, and is usually replicated through many or every page of the site.  Every modern blog has a sidebar, and is usually filled with links and resources to other sites.  Some of these can provide value such as a descriptive text link, versus an image.

Footer

A footer link is one that appears in every page way down at the bottom of the page.  It usually contains credits to the companies that design, build and host a website.  These are considered to be lower in value than a contextual or sidebar link.

Reciprocal

Reciprocal links are websites that exchange links with each other, usually on a “Links” page or similar.  These have been heavily devalued over the years, as search engines started to see a trend of massive link building with sites that were not at all related.  Some reciprocal links are good if they come from authoritative sources, the content is related, and are not the majority type of links pointing to the site.  Read our other blog post on why reciprocal links are bad.

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2 Comments »Tags: contextual links, footer links, inbound links, reciprocal links, sidebar links

Anchor text refers to the text that is highlighted and underlined on a website that points to another website. For an image, the anchor text is contained in the alt tag, which is visible in the HTML.

Many sites have inbound links with general and non-descriptive text. This is no fault of yours, it’s just that the referring site did not understand the SEO value in pointing to you correctly.

Let’s look at an example of good and poor anchor text:

Poor anchor text
“Pear Analytics has software to help manage search engine optimization with a variety of plans and pricing.”

Better anchor text
“Pear Analytics, a company that builds search engine optimization software, offers a variety of plans and pricing.”

In the poor example, the site is pointing to us with our brand name. In reality, most sites will not have difficulty in ranking high for their company or brand name. If this link was from an especially good source, it would be a waste of inbound link potential. An even worse example of inbound link anchor text is “click here.”

In the better example, the site is linking to us with much a more precise and descript key phrase. This helps the search engine determine what the page is about, and the more inbound links with that exact anchor text, the higher we will eventually rank for that word or phrase.

SiteJuice offers an extensive analysis of your inbound links, ranking them from best to worst. You can easily see the anchor text pointing to you, and target text changes on the more valuable links.

3 Comments »Tags: anchor text, inbound links