The Optimal Link Format
What's a Quality Link?
We explained you that it is of primary importance to have sites which link to your's. If your little brother, who has just published the first pages of his site, put a link towards your site, unfortunately that will not undoubtedly have little influence on the popularity of your site. On the contrary, if Yahoo! decides to put a link towards your site from their homepage, then your site will quickly be propelled at the top of the results!
In fact, a quality link is a link from a page having a strong popularity, i.e. good PageRank in the case of Google.
This said, there are two other significant criteria: the number of links and the context of the linking page. More precisely, the format of the link must comply with some rules to be optimal.
The Optimal Link Format
The link context is very important. In the case of PageRank for example, a link between two pages will bring more PageRank if both contexts are identical.
In fact, the context may only be based upon
- the title of the page A linking to page B,
- the anchor text (text used to establish the link within the <A> HTML tag).
Then it is better that page A talks about the same subject as page B, and that the anchor text comprises the best selected keywords for page B. The optimal format of a text link of a site A towards a site B must be the following:
<a href="http://www.siteB.com/pageB.htm"> put here the optimal keywords for site B</a>
When you ask to another webmaster to make a links exchange, give him (her) a code like this one, stuffed with all your keywords (in general the text should be the title of your site).
Do not forget that to optimize the contribution of a link in terms of PageRank, the page which will contain the link to your page must have a good PageRank (let's say more than 4), and must have the least number of links. Check for example that the links page is not orphan, and that it does not contain a META tag prohibiting the crawlers from indexing it...
If you prefer making a banners exchange, the image must contain an ALT attribute with your keywords:
<a href="http://www.siteB.com/pageB.htm"><img src="thumbnail.png" alt="put here the optimal keywords for site B"></a>
