Quality vs. Quantity
In a world where everything can be found on the Internet, it is extremely important that people can find what they are looking for in the top results of a search engine. Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving the ranking of a website on a search engine, to move a site closer to the top of the results. Having people link to the site is a good way to get to the top of a search engine, but how do you get people to post quality links to your blog? The answer is quality posts and SEO techniques. SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: white hat and black hat.
White hat SEO methods conform to search engines’ guidelines, the main one being not deceiving the engine’s crawler. A good example of this is targeting your content at the reader, not the search engine. In addition, a post must be of good quality, this meaning the post must have something that is helpful, interesting, useful, original, or funny. If a post does not give the reader something useful, it is likely wasting their time and is probably of poor quality. Useful posts help obtain link authority. Link authority, as defined by http://www.internetintelligenceworks.com, is the “Authority for a website [that] is gained by a webpage, through quality, incoming links.” What does this mean? In short, it says the more good quality websites that have links to your site, the higher it will appear in search engines.
The number of links to your site does not necessarily matter. It is better to have a few quality links, than a large number of bad links that can bring your search rank down.
5 Steps to Determining Link Quality
To find out if a link is of acceptable quality, ask yourself these questions:
- Does the site rank in search engines for its company name, website name and other simple, or obvious keywords found on its own homepage? If it does not, a link from this site may do more harm than good.
- How does the site rank for the terms it is targeting? For example, let’s say the site is about Popsicles. Does the site show up in the top 20 for searches for Popsicles on the most popular search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)? If so, it should boost your search engine rank.
- Is the site linking to you indexed on the three major engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)? Can it be found by searching for its domain? If the URL is not indexed, the link is not likely to be found by search engines and will not help your search rank.
- Does the linking site have a positive Google PageRank? If you see green in the Google toolbar tool, it means the site has a positive page rank, white or grey means the site has a penalized or low page rank, which will eventually lower your page rank if linked to.
- How are the other links on the site? Are the majority of the links on-topic, or are there links to completely unrelated topics such as dating, adult material, cash advances, etc.? Off-topic links should be avoided because they may cause the search rank to decrease in the future.
If you answered no to more than two of these questions, the link will probably be considered bad quality by a search engine.
Black hat SEO methods try to trick the search engines. These methods include, having hidden text that is either: the same color as the background, in a hidden div, or placed off screen. Websites found to be using black hat methods will have to face the consequences, which normally include removal from the search database or a reduced search rank. In February of 2006, BMW’s site was removed from Google’s search pages due to the use of black hat methods. Not too long after the removal, an apology to Google was made, and BMW appeared in the search results once again.
Quality Over Quantity
If more posts means more links, then a large quantity of small posts seems like the best way to attract more readers. At first, you may think it is easier and less time consuming, but in reality, it is more like to decrease your site’s search engine rank. A blog should be full of well-written posts, because poor quality posts can annoy readers. A blog full of unoriginal poorly written posts is less likely to get linked to, having a negative effect on its search engine rank. On the rare occasion a well-written post is made, it is less likely to get discovered because the rest the blog is “bringing it down.” You should be aiming for quality posts that will generate more links, and a better search rank.
The best form of SEO is creating great content. Posts that do not waste the reader’s time are more likely to get quality links even if a new post only appears one a week, or once every two weeks. Well-written posts cause search engine ranks to rise, resulting in more traffic. In the end, remember that quality is more important than quantity. As Steve Jobs once said, “One home run is much better than two doubles.”
