Glossary of Terms used on this Website
Here's the definition of anchor text of the back link: it is the text used on a web page for a link -- the words you click on when you click a link. An example: Link Strategies. "Link Strategies" is the anchor text. Anchor text is often used to indicate to your visitor the content of the page being linked to. It also tells search engines what the page being linked to is about, and is important for search engine optimization. If it comprises keywords relevant to the web page it points to, it boosts that page's ranking in the search engines for those keywords. Oftentimes you see "Click Here" used as anchor text. What that means is, it's telling search engines that the target page is about "click here"! And they probably weren't wanting to rank highly for that keyword! So use anchor text wisely, to boost your search engine rankings. If you're asking another webmaster to link to your site, it's a good idea to provide him with the HTML code to paste into his page, so you get to choose the anchor text. But vary the anchor text a bit, for different partner sites. Otherwise it appears very contrived, to the search engines, to find those links all having the same anchor text. Links into your site from other websites help to push up your search engine ranking, as they are seen as a vote of support. The more links, the better. They boost your site's PageRank, by passing on link juice to it. This led to spamming of blogs and other sites that invite comments, purely for the sake of link juice, as commenters get to include a link to their website. To discourage this, Google came up with the 'NoFollow' tag. When set for a link, it tells search engines not to pass on link juice to that link, i.e. not to count that link in ranking the target site. This has reduced spamming of links, so that search engines get truer results when keywords are searched. Blogs and sites that use this have typically much less spam comments to weed out. Many social bookmarking websites have implemented this strategy as well, setting the bookmark links on their sites as NoFollow. PageRank is a 10-point scale, used by Google as a relative measure of a website's trust and authority. 10 is the highest, based on the quality and, to a lesser extent, quantity of incoming links (also called in-pointing links or backlinks), which are links from other websites to it. This is because search engine spiders, being merely software, are limited in their ability to evaluate a site's quality. So Google uses links from other sites as an indicator of the site's quality, on the basis that people link to good sites, whether for their own reference, or to recommend them. Incoming links pass on link juice. If a site has a high PageRank, it is logical to conclude that there must be lots of links, especially good quality links (i.e. from higher rank websites), and therefore link juice coming in, to have given it that rank. Google's toolbar (which you can install from http://toolbar.google.com/) shows the PageRank or PR score of a website as a green band. Theoretically, a website with a PR of 6 ranks higher than a site with a PR of 4 for the same keyword, all else being equal. And a link from a website with a PR of 7 contributes more to your site's rank than one from a website with PR of 3, again, all else being equal. Examples: Google website itself has a PageRank, or PR of 10; Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, Microsoft, have PR of 9; new websites with few backlinks have PR of 0. If you have a PR of 4 or more, you are probably getting pretty decent traffic from your incoming links. But don't get too caught up with PageRank; a website with a lower rank can get more traffic than one with a higher rank. PageRank is just one of the many factors influencing search engine ranking.
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