You are probably aware of the importance of inbound links to your website. An inbound link is a link from an external webpage to one of your webpages. Link popularity was a gauge of search term relevance from the beginning of Google’s existence. “BackRub” was the search engine algorithm that analyzed inbound links to a webpage to prove popularity and relevance. Black hat SEO’s of course have found ways to manipulate this of course over the years. Through paid links and link farms of all kinds, generic inbound links are easier than ever to obtain.

Inbound Link Relevance

By putting yourself in the shoes of a search engineer like say, Google, you help yourself gain a better understanding of where they are coming from. If webmasters begin to take advantage of “link popularity” then you need to find a more specific route to gauge what sites are more relevant than others. A great way to do this is through Inbound Link Relevance. If you have a website and are marketing a restaurant in Ogden, Utah, and have an inbound link from a sporting goods website from Reno, Nevada, and better yet the link is on a page about “buying sporting goods in Reno”, that link does not carry much relevance with it. Why is site b (sporting good store) linking to site a (restaurant). It gets much more specific and complicated than that but I wanted to give that to you as a simple and quick example.

It’s About The Anchor Text

One of the best ways to show relevance is through the anchor text of the inbound link. For example, a basic and non descriptive link with no relevance power at all would look like this:

Powered By Evolve

Notice there is nothing here that describes really much of anything. “Powered By” is very generic and really doesn’t mean anything. “Evolve”, well that must be the name of the website that it is linking too. But that term is so generic as well. A much better example would be something like this:

Powered by Evolve - a web development company in Utah

Now that’s more like it! The anchor text in this link is much more descriptive. Now I know what “Evolve” is. Before I had absolutely no idea. Now I know it’s a “web development company in Utah”. This link now carries much more weight for terms like the following:

  • web development utah
  • utah web development
  • utah web developer
  • web developer utah
  • utah web company

And the list goes on. You get the point. We can and will discuss much more about Inbound link relevance as it is a very complicated and important science with SEO. But that is not the purpose with this article. I wrote this article to help you understand one of the important fundamentals of search engine optimization. When you are getting inbound links to your website, be sure to have anchor text in those links that will benefit you with specific search terms. Spend the quality time necessary researching your keywords and then applying them in your link campaigns. Improvement in this area will benefit your SEO campaign greatly.