3 Amazing but Little Known Secrets to Make Your Website Blast to the Top of Search Engine Rankings	4.4/5.0 (5 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Jim Corkern October 16, 2006

I know you hear all of the squabble about links being the number 1 factor in getting your website top search engine positions. I have had many clients come to me and say, I have hundreds more links than the top 10 sites for the keywords I am targeting, and all of my links are from related sites, Why is my site not in the top 10?

The reply is always the same. There are 3 factors that you are not doing or allowing for in your campaign. We will now cover the 3 things that professional SEO’s do not want you to know about links.

1. Anchor Text: Anchor text is the clickable text of a hyper link. To show you how it works, go to Google and search the phrase “Click Here”. The number 1 site in the natural search results will be Adobe.com. Now ask yourself, why would the adobe site rank number 1 for the term “Click Here” when “click here” is not on the page or in the source code of that page? Here is the reason. Have you ever visited a website and they had a downloadable file in PDF format? It has wording similar to this “You can download this file for free, you will need the adobe reader to read this file, If you do not have the adobe reader “Click Here” to download the adobe reader for free” and click here is the clickable text that links to the adobe site. Starting to get the picture? Your anchor text for your website should contain the phrase or word you want your site to rank for. This is the number 1 reason that people never get their sites to rank for their keywords.

2. The second mistake is in calculating how many links you will need to get top positions in Google. Google only gives a sample of the links they have credited to a website. This is as simple as it gets. I use Yahoo to get an average of links compared to the links showing on Google. Let me explain. If you go to yahoo and check a sites links and they show 497 links. Then go to Google and see how many they have credited, it will be much less than Yahoo, but let’s say for our example it is 50. Then, if you do a comparison, you will need to have over 500 links on Yahoo pointing to your site to catch up with this site you are trying to beat in Google. This should give you close to the same amount on Google.

3. The final factor that is most common in causing a “miss” is not calculating or allowing for the top sites continued link building campaign. With Yahoo and Google, updates are completed on a cycle. These cycles are not carved in stone. Google averages 90 day cycles for major updates, Yahoo averages about 50 days. So, you have to allow for the fact that the top 10 websites know that other sites are looking to take over their positions. If a new site gets into the top 10, they know that one of them drops out of the top 10, so they are constantly building links. They may not build at the rate that someone climbing is building. But rest assured they are building. When you decide the total number of links you will need, add 30%. This should put you in a position to overcome their link popularity and gain web traffic.

Note: There are many other factors that affect your sites positions due to links, like the PR (Page Rank) of the page your link is on, the title, Content, Keyword density, position of link on the page, ECT…. This article is to help the Average website owner or webmaster clear up the most common problems with link building.