5 linking factors you haven't thought of

If you've been involved in your search engine optimisation campaign for a while, it's likely that you've absorbed a fair amount of information. Some of it might even now come instinctively. You'll know things like high-profile sites provide the best links, links from sites with links to spam is a bad thing, and grabbing a bunch of unique links is a good idea. As with everything, once you've grasped these basics, it's time to move on to something more complicated.

There are hundreds of factors that are taken into account by the search engines in judging your links. The search engine optimisation industry isn't really aware of all of them, but there are a few of the trickier ones that SEO pros have managed to nail down. Here are five of the linking factors that you may not be aware of:

1. Links higher up in the code have more power. When it comes to links, it's all about the power of the vote they cast for your popularity. Targeting powerful sites is only the beginning. A more complex SEO campaign should take into account how that link is presented. It has long been suspected that links that are higher up in the page code count for more. Google guru Matt Cutts confirmed this in his own roundabout way in November when he gave a strong hint to bloggers that they should put important links near the top of their page.

2. Good neighbourhoods provide better links. It's fairly certain that the search engines use trusted 'seed sets' of sites to calculate the trustworthiness of other sites. Sites like government sites or media sites are thought to be within these seed sets. Think of it this way. Google calculates a site's rankings depending on the connections a site has. These connections make up that site's neighbourhood. Therefore, getting links from sites within these neighbourhoods is a good idea.

3. Links within HTML carry more weight than image links. This isn't necessarily a well-known idea, but a few select SEO companies have discovered that clients benefit more from links anchored with keywords in the HTML than with links through images.

4. Navigation links are less valuable than content links. It seems natural to include links to important sites in a navigation bar, but Google has discovered that links within content tend to be more relevant to a page's topic. If you can, try to get content links for your SEO campaign.

5. Noscript is a no-no. Finally, it is thought that links contained within noscript tags don't pass on as much value. Why this is, no one really knows, but many SEO experts believe it to be so. It's strange that such a little tag could potentially do damage to your link profile, but there it is.

The algorithms for the search engines change all the time, and it's important to stay in touch with your search engine optimisation company to keep on top of things. You can talk to our consultants at SEO Consult about these and other linking factors.

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