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Everywhere you turn on the 'net, you see something about search engine optimization. I'm convinced that 90% of the information about SEO is regurgitated crap. Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to admit that you can't do anything without a well-optimized web page. If your web page sucks, the search engines will treat it as such. But now, search engines have shifted their focus from the web site in question to the pages that link to the site.

There are quite a few offpage factors about a page that is linking to you that can increase or decrease the backlink value quite a bit, and I'm going to cover most of these factors in this article.

Many authors have covered the basic need for backlinks, so I won't go into it here. However, if you'd like to learn more about backlinking, check out another article I wrote: http://www.content-articles.com/article.aspx?i=24&t=Crash-Course-in-Getting-a-#1-Google-Ranking

A quick note - You can view all of the backlinks for a site by visiting MSN.com or any other major search engine and typing in link: followed by the domain. (ex - 'link:http://www.Content-Articles.com') I use MSN to find my backlinks, because they report all backlinks they have indexed, as opposed to Google and Yahoo, that only list ones they deem 'important.'

Ok, now on to the 6 truths!

Truth 1: The Page Title of The Website Linking To You Matters

Yep, this one matters a lot. If the title of the links page includes one or more of your keywords, it will give the link to your site more weight. So check into your prospective link partners, and look at the title of the page your link will be on.

You can usually find this pretty easily by using the backlink listing from above, as most page titles will be listed in the search engine results.

Truth 2: The Number of Outbound Links On The Website That Is Linking To You

One page can only have so much 'importance' (Page Rank) to give away, so the more links on the page, the less the link to your site counts. Therefore, if your site is the only outbound link on the page, it's going to carry much more weight than a 'links page' with 100 outbound links on it. I suggest a maximum of 25 links per page - many more than that devalues your link too much.

This one will require the quite a bit of work if your link is on a lot of typical links pages. You'll have to visit the page and manually count how many links on the page are outbound links.

Truth 3: The Content of The Page Linking To You

If you can get a link on a content page (as opposed to a links page) it will definitely be to your benefit. This is because 1) there probably won't be many other outbound links on that page, and 2) the content on the page will most likely be related to the keywords in your anchor text, so the search engines will give your link more weight. You'll also enjoy the bonus of the targeted traffic coming directly from that page. It can be tedious to find out which sites have your link on a content page. You may be able to find this out by checking the referrers' section of your stats package - if you're getting quite a few clicks from a certain site, your link is probably on a page with some content.

Truth 4: The Number And Type Of Links Linking To The Page That's Linking To You

Wow, that was a mouthful. In a nutshell, the more the owner(s) of the site linking to you concentrated on offpage optimization while they were considering their linking partners, the more it will increase your link's weight.

This is pretty much worthless to try to figure out on your own, unless you have dedicated staff people who you can pay, or a program to automate this process and report back to you. You'll have to find out the offpage optimization for each site linking to you, and that will take time you don't have.

Truth 5: The IP Addresses Of The Pages Linking To You

Search engines look up the IP address of the pages linking to you, and links from the same IP are devalued accordingly. This is to keep webmasters from pointing all of their sites at each other. It's not a bad thing to have more than one link per IP, but it's more valuable to have lots of links from different addresses.

To find the IPs of the pages linking to you, go to http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/class-c-checker.php and enter between 2 and 10 links to check their IP addresses. However, this will become very tedious if you have hundreds or thousands of backlinks to check.

Truth 6: Whether Or Not The Websites Linking To You Are Deemed By Google As An Authority Website

This is something most webmasters don't even know exists - 'authority websites.' Most government (.gov) sites are considered 'authority' sites. Or, sites like About.com, Microsoft.com, and others have also reached the 'authority' status. This status is usually granted only to 'supersites' that include tons of content and information, and if you can get a link from one of these sites to your site, it can be a huge positive effect on your rank. It's almost impossible to know if a site is considered an authority, but any site with PR 8-10 is probably in this category.

This Sounds So Time Consuming, Is It Worth It?

In one word: Yes. Spend all the time you need to get good, targeted backlinks from pages with great offpage optimization. If you don't have the time to do all of this by hand, check out SEO Elite (http://www.GetSEOElite.com). It finds all of the information I've discussed in this article (and more), and all I have to do is click a few buttons and give it a URL to start on. I'll find the #1 website for a keyword I want to use, put it into SEO Elite, and then copy their linking strategy for my site. Most of the sites trading links with them are more than happy to trade with me as well, so it takes a ton of work off of my plate.

Armed And Dangerous

Now that you've got valuable information that most other webmasters don't have (or don't use), get out there and get your sites listed higher! Just don't beat any of my sites'

To Your Success, And Your #1 Website!