• Prefers natural link growth over time
• Is good at determining paid links
• Biased towards link based data
• Site age can determine trust
• Keyword usage, density and variation is important
• Anchor text is important (it is used in the relevance factor)
• Reciprocal and sitewide links do not carry as much importance as plain editorial links
• Can take up to 12 months to penetrate search engines for competitive terms

Google place the most importance on backlinks compared to any other search engine. The quality and quantity also plays a considerable factor. Getting as many links from anywhere and everywhere can actually hurt your site as the links may not be relevant to your website. If you really want to dominate your niche, you need to build your links the right way from the start!

Good luck with your Search Engine Optimisation

Relevance is measured by the content that Google can access from a website. Each and every page of your website is an entry point for a search engine. You should optimise each product, service or content category to be most relevant to your targeted keywords. Making your website more relevant to your targeted keywords will increase your search rankings. This is one of the most basic principles of SEO.

Authority can be see a social indicator of how popular a website is in a particular industry. Authority can measure expertise within your industry. Authority sites will often have large amounts of content as they are an industry source for information.

Trust is a measure of how reliable a website can be in providing information. Trust is measured with the ingredients of authority, relevance and links. Part of trust is site age and link age. For competitive niche’s it can take up to a year to rank for keywords.

When writing your content and looking for link partners one of the most important aspects is relevance. Google wants to give the most relevant search results. If you build your site to have targeted relevance content and you get links from industry related relevant websites you will be optimising  your site the Google way!

By implementing “SEO friendly” internal linking structures you will be telling Google which pages are more important in your site.  You will also be “voting” for each of your internal pages with the exact anchor text that you chose. You simply do not have that flexibility with external link building as not all webmasters think like web strategists.

Google prefers editorial links compared to acquired links. So as you are writing copy in your website and you notice you are talking about one of your sub pages, link to that sub page with your targeted anchor text. As long as you don’t spam it up, you are adding a contextual, editorial link which is of much higher value. Also check your webpage ‘PageRank’. If your internal page has a ‘PageRank’ then you can use that to boost other internal pages by passing on the link love.

You may be thinking “I have site wide navigation” and “what about my footer navigation”? Google does not give these links as much value as a plain and simple optimised text links. So next time when your adding new content into your site, if you get the chance add a few text links to your other pages. Also remember to make your sites internal linking structure “SEO friendly”.