Finding a Proper Balance of Links for your Website

Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! find your website through other sites linking to it. A site with a large number of quality sites linking to it signifies a certain importance to the search engines, boosting your rankings in the process.

There are many ways you can acquire links to your site. They can be purchased from a link farm, or you can get people to link to you through social networks like Facebook, StumbleUpon and Digg. In the end, the highest quality links come from sites in a similar industry whose audience will find your content appealing and useful.

Allowing the structure of links to your site to become too homogenous can cause many negative consequences for your site and its rankings. Links coming from only one type of site, or only to your homepage or links that all have the same anchor text links are all red flags to the search engines that your site has an unnatural link structure.

As a result, search engines will penalize your site, perhaps even de-listing it from the search engines.

To avoid trouble like this, you should attempt a general 80/20 link balancing act, which means:

• 80% of your links should come from sites that are topically relevant to yours with the remaining 20% coming from unrelated or marginally related sites
• 80% of incoming links should go to your homepage with the remaining 20% (at minimum) going to sub-pages within your site
• 80% of links should have your keywords in the anchor text while the remaining 20% having a less optimized link, like “click here” or your URL as the anchor text
• 80% of your links should be one-way and the remaining 20% reciprocal

Of course, these are just general guidelines but a good rule of thumb to avoid any problems with the search engines. You don’t want your site to appear over-optimized to the search engines so you need to balance your link ratios to avoid this red flag.