SEO Chaper-1: Link Relevancy

As search engines matured, they started identifying more metrics for determining rankings. One that stood out among the rest was link relevancy.

The difference between link relevancy and link popularity (discussed in the previous section) is that link relevancy does not take into account the power of the link. Instead, it is a natural phenomenon that works when people link out to other content.

Let me give you an example of how it works. Say I own a blog where I write about whiteboard markers. (\fes, I did just look around my office for an example to use, and yes, there are actually people who blog about whiteboard markers. I checked.) Ever inclined to learn more about my passion for these magical writing utensils, I spend part of my day reading online what other people have to say about whiteboard markers.

On my hypothetical online reading journey, I find an article about the psychological effects of marker color choice. Excited, I go back to my website to blog about the article so (both of) my friends can read about it. Now here is the critical takeaway. When I write the blog post and link to the article, I get to choose the anchor text. I could choose something like "click here," but more likely I choose something that it is relevant to the article. In this case I choose "psychological effects of marker color choice." Someone else who links to the article might use the link anchor text "marker color choice and the effect on the brain."

People ha\e a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. Use this to your advantage by including keywords you want to rank tor in these two elements.

This human-powered information is essential to modem-day search engines. These descriptions are relatively unbiased and produced by real people. This metric, in combination with complicated natural language processing, makes up the lion's share of relevancy indicators online.

Other important relevancy indicators are link sources and information hierarchy. For example, the search engines can also use the fact that I linked to the color choice article from a blog about whiteboard markers to
supplement their understanding of relevancy. Similarly, they can use the fact that the original article was located at the URL www.example.com/vision/color/ to determine the high-level positioning and relevancy of the content. As you read later in this book (Chapter 2 specifically), these secrets are essential for SEOs to do their job.

Beyond specific anchor text, proximal text—the certain number of characters preceding and following the link itself—have some value. Something that's logical, but annoying is when people use a verb as anchor text, such as "Frank said ..." or "Jennifer wrote ...", using "said" or "wrote" as the anchor text pointing back to the post. In a situation like that, engines have figured out how to apply the context of the surrounding copy to the link.