Seo: the Perfect Score

There are many things a webmaster must do in order to promote his/her web site to improve search engine rankings. These tasks include both onsite and offsite objectives. While there are many other pieces of advice that are important to follow such as finding the most important keywords for your site, keeping keyword density around 3-6% on your pages, and building backlinks to your web site, this article aims at one certain aspect of SEO that is sometimes termed a "handshake". "The perfect score" is what I call what is often called a "quality link" by search engines and webmasters.

Just what is a quality link?

There are many definitions for a "quality link", but most of them don't tell you how to optimize the handshake for a specific keyword. A quality link is simply put a highly relevant link to your site's content. What is meant by a "handshake" is that both the site the link is placed on and your site are about the same or similar topics or at the very least, the link that is put on the other site contains keywords that are relevant to your site.

So, what is a perfect score?

A "perfect score" is when all aspects of the link match, and the closer you are to a perfect score when you place a link to yours on another website, the more likely you are to move in terms of search engine ranking.

For example, lets say you have a website about cat litter. The keywords that are most important to you would perhaps be "cat litter", "kitty litter", "pet care", "pet supplies", etc. For the sake of argument, let's say you want to optimize for the keyword "kitty litter".

Page Content

Let's start with the content on the web page you will be linking to (it might be your homepage, it might not). The content of your page should be informative and descriptive for your readers, but most importantly it must contain the keyword "kitty litter". You should perhaps use the term in the title of the page, a heading of the page (such as the title of an article), in one or two of the ALT tags for images, and throughout several paragraphs of text. Keep the keyword density between 3-6% (mention the keyword once for about every 30-40 other words). In addition, your keyword should be one of the first 3 keywords in the meta keywords and should appear at least once but no more than 3 times in the meta description for the page.

This procedure should be done for each page on your website you want optimized for the keyword. Keep in mind you may be optimizing for dozens or hundreds of keywords, so you may want to scatter them throughout your site in addition to having at least one or two highly optimized pages for those keywords.

Relevant Links

Now that you have optimized your page that you will be linking to for the keyword "kitty litter", you need to place links on websites that are relevant to the site's content. Generally speaking, the more relevant the host site is to the keyword "kitty litter", the more important it is.

Now, there are many other factors to consider here. First of all, search engines rank sites based on a ranking system. Popular ranking systems are Alexa and Google PageRank (PR). These ranking systems also factor into the "quality" of your link. Secondly, search engines do not know the definition of the keywords but they do have a process known as "keyword association" which simply put is a relevancy given to certain key phrases based on them appearing together on hundreds to hundreds of thousands of other websites.

For example, the search engines most likely already know that "kitty litter" is highly relevant to "cat litter", is fairly relevant to "pet supplies", and is not relevant to "swimming pool". This means if you put your link on a web site that is about "swimming pools", it won't be given as much credit as one that is put on a site about "pet supplies". Ideally you would want to put your link only on web sites that pertain to "kitty litter". But let's face it, how many of them could there be and how many of them would actually accept your link request? This is where keyword association comes into play. You are more likely to find lots of websites that are about pet supplies, pet care, and dog grooming than you are about kitty litter. Notice that I included "dog grooming" in that list. Keep in mind, the search engines don't know the definition of the word cat or the definition of the word dog, they only know that the two terms are related to a certain extent. The more likely it is for two terms to appear together on the same website or same webpage, the more likely the search engines will consider them "relevant". For example, "cat" might be more relevant to the term "dog" than it is with the keyword "horse" simply because of common phrases such as "it is raining cats and dogs" that are posted on various websites.

Finding links is an ongoing process, and you can always go back and ask yourself "what is relevant to kitty?" and "what is relevant to litter?" to try to find more websites that relate to the subject at hand.

Well Formed Links

Now I will cover putting the actual link on the other website. While often you will not have the kind of flexibility you need to make a well-formed link in another site's directory or forum, what you need to aim for is a link with the term "kitty litter" in the link itself, most preferably by itself in lowercase. Keep in mind, most searches are done in lowercase and some search engines might consider the term "kitty litter" more relevant than "Kitty Litter" simply because the searcher typed it into the search engine all in lowercase. Also, if the link says "about kitty litter" or "click here for kitty litter", it may have less relevancy than a link that only contains "kitty litter".

In order to put a well-formed link on the other site to yours optimized for the keyword "kitty litter", you will need the following HTML code:

kitty litter

Be sure that you use the "http://" in the link because some websites assume the page is on the local website instead of yours if the protocol is missing. Also link to the page that you have optimized for the keyword "kitty litter" if possible. If not, the homepage is the best place to link.

As I mentioned before, you may not have the flexibility to put this kind of link in. Often directories have a "Title" field that you can put in the text that will appear in the link. However, sometimes the only way to put a link in is to the actual domain (http://www.yoursite.com). Don't let this stop you, just know that it has slightly less relevancy than a link with "kitty litter" in the inner text.

One last thing on well-formed links. Some websites are set up to keep track of how many clicks each of their listings get by passing the user through a "clicks" page on their local site". While this may be a nice feature and the user will end up at your page when they click, the link often doesn't count as far as SEO is concerned. A good way to check this is by hovering over the link or right clicking on the link and clicking "copy shortcut" and pasting it into NotePad or Word. If the domain is your own, it is a good link, if it is their domain it doesn't count. Unless you are fairly certain you can get relevant traffic out of that site, don't waste your time with listing yourself there unless you can get a "live" link (anchor tag to your site).

The Perfect Score

So in summary, a perfect score is a handshake that happens when:

1. The content of the page on your site is optimized for the target keyword
2. The meta keywords and meta description fields contain the target keyword
3. The web site hosting your link is highly related (in whole or in part) to the subject matter of the target keyword
4. The page that your link is hosted on is highly related to the target keyword
5. The link itself is an anchor tag to your website's page that is optimized for the target keyword
6. The link contains the target keyword, preferably by itself in lowercase

That said, depending on how competitive of subject matter your field has you may need anywhere from a few to a few thousand "perfect score" links to make your website rank higher.