Without Links An Author Website Is Invisible

Why Links Are Important

If you do everything else right, create a beautiful website full of well written, compelling content that has meaning and utility to large numbers of people, and you don't get any links, you haven't achieved a thing. I can't put it any stronger than this, without incoming links, an author's website is essentially invisible. The search engines will index the site if you tell them it's there, you might even get the occasional visitor on some obscure phrase or proper name, but it's no different from starting a walk-in business in a private home with no signage, no word-of-mouth and no phone listing. Links are the life blood of the world wide web, and they come in three basic varieties. Incoming links are critical in establishing the value of your site and helping search engines determine what other people think your site is all about. Outgoing links help the search engines determine which neighborhood you live in and what you think your own site is about. Internal links let people navigate your website and reinforces how the search engines categorize your content.

The standard method of displaying links on the Internet is to show a bit of text as underlined, or to have that text perform an action (like a button being pushed in) when your mouse pointer floats over it. Click on the link, and it will take you to a new web page, either on the same website, in the case of an internal navigation link, or to a page on another website, in the case of an external link. Some websites consist of nothing but a collection of links to other websites, with a description or ranking of those other sites. Yahoo! got it's start as an authority site, providing links to sites in different categories that had been reviewed by human editors to see if they really contained useful content. Creating such authority sites on a smaller scale is still a popular activity with hobbyists and experts, who publish collections of links to sites that they have discovered themselves and found useful. Such authority sites often demand link exchanges. They are happy to link to your site, providing it has legitimate content and you provide a link in return. I'm not really comfortable with this model and I don't participate in any link swapping myself. But if that's what it takes to get your website listed in a couple of carefully selected authority sites when you start out and you're having trouble getting links without quid-pro-quos, it's worth trying. But make sure they are legitimate authority sites that have been around for years doing the same thing before exchanging links. You can check the history of a website by using the WayBack Machine at www.archive.org.

I'm not sure anybody has a good count of the number of search engines out there, but for practical purposes, only three matter: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Of the three, Google is dominant, and drives more true search traffic than the other two combined. What I mean by "true" traffic is searches initiated by people who sit down at the computer and think, "I'm going to search for something", often saying, "I'm going to Google it." People still use the Microsoft and Yahoo search engines, but my feeling is they use those other search engines primarily because they happen to be using the Yahoo! portal (news, e-mail, groups) or the Microsoft portal (news, finance, Hotmail) or Microsoft software that defaults to the Microsoft search. Toolbars provided by Yahoo! and Microsoft for the browser are another reason people use their search, the dialog box for entering queries is always right there on the toolbar. But to be an effective consumer of web intelligence, you must install the Google toolbar and accept the terms that give you access to the PageRank display.

So much has been written about PageRank and its importance that it would be foolish to try to read it all, much less to summarize it in a single paragraph. But I'm going to try to accomplish the latter, and you can be the judge. PageRank, often shortened to PR in correspondence on the subject, is expressed by the Google Toolbar as a green bar meter, which shows a number from 0 to 10 when you float the mouse pointer over it. A page rank of 0 is very bad unles sthe page is new, a page rank of 10 is very good and beyond reach, a page rank of 5 is more than adequate to get most content good visibility in search results when it's highly relevant to the users search query. PageRank is far from being the only criteria that Google uses in determining which web pages to return in their search results, and how to rank them, but it's a good indicator of what Google thinks about the overall quality of a website. A website with a high PageRank is a valuable piece of internet real estate, just like bricks-and-mortar retail space in a high traffic area.

But PageRank is not exactly equivalent to the concept of "neighborhood" I keep talking about. Neighborhoods can be good or bad, and PageRank is usually a pretty good indicator of that, but neighborhoods can also be ethnic, or specialist, in web terms. If you write primarily about medical forensics, as either a fiction author or a medical professional, the best links for you to get are those from sites related to forensics. While a link from a high PageRank site about raising iguanas as pets will help the PageRank of your site, it will do nothing to improve your standing in the forensics neighborhood. Too many such unrelated high PR links may even prejudice an intelligent search engine against your site, in terms of forensics visibility, since the search engines are inclined to trust the accuracy of high value linkers in characterizing the true relevancy of your content. So don't get caught up in the game of collecting links from whoever you can and trying to build the integer value of your PageRank. Concentrate on attracting links from sites relevant to your topic, and if you can find relevant sites with good PageRanks willing to link you, that's even better..

When other websites provide links to your website, they may simply link your domain name, or your home page, rather than linking to a page with some specific content of interest. While any quality incoming links help, deep links, or links directly to pages on your site that address a certain subset of a subject or very specific topic, are usually more valuable in building a presence. These deep links help elevate that specific page in the eyes of the search engine for the particular points it addresses, especially if the context of the link on the site providing it is clearly related. Thanks to deep linking, a single website can exist in multiple neighborhoods. Once your website is established in the eyes of the search engines as having value in one neighborhood, you can easily expand out from there, and your new content will derive some benefit from your existing reputation.

The best incoming links to get are links from related sites, even sites that may compete with your site for visitors, but who are motivated to link you by some unique content on your site. A good example of this is my analysis of what Amazon sales ranks say about how many copies of that book Amazon is selling. There are hundreds of unsolicited external links pointing to this page on my website, it's refered to in a half-dozen academic papers, and it remains a unique presentation some seven years after I first published it (with occasional updates). I'd found a problem to write about that I was personally obsessed with at the time, and I was able to apply my oddball background to coming up with a solution. The difficulty of the problem, combined with the fact that nobody is willing to pay for a solution, meant I didn't have any competition. While I didn't know it at the time, that article and all of the incoming links it earned helped launch my site as a publishing resource and platform. The reason all those publishing and writing sites were willing to link my page was because they wanted to express an opinion based on the content, and linking back to the source was almost an necessity to make their argument.

Outgoing links are also valuable in terms of establishing your neighborhood, though somewhat less valuable than the incoming links. I don't link outside sites unless I am writing about them, quoting from them, or want people to be aware of them as a reference. Many web designers take a different approach, linking well established sites simply in hope of being included in their neighborhood. It may help, but it's not enough in and of itself, for the same reason that repeating the phrase "I'm an expert on banking" over and over again on your site is unlikely to get Google to send you visitors looking for a banking expert. The people who write the software algorithms that produce the search results know that many people building websites are trying to cheat the system. Some are out and out liars, and feel no shame about creating websites designed to sell "adult" materials, but disguised to draw visitors from unrelated subjects, including preschool education. The only way the search engines have to differentiate between the tricksters and the legitimate websites is to emphasize the measures that aren't easy to lie about, like the value and context of incoming links. Outgoing links are entirely within the control of the person who writes the web page, so there's nothing to prevent the the scam artist from extensively linking some unrelated subject in a good neighborhood to try to improve his own standing. So, while outgoing links make sense when there's a good reason to include them, they won't help much with positioning your own site until you've won the trust of the search engines through incoming links.

Internal links are important to help break up the content on your website into navigable chunks for visitors and to keep multiple subjects from getting watered down in search engine algorithms, For example, if you have fifty pages on your website, thirty about criminal justice, twelve about animal husbandry, and eight about the genealogy of the Swedish royal family, you don't want every one of those pages to link to every other page on the site. For one thing, it will look like a real mess to your readers, but more importantly, it will dilute the value of the individual subjects in the eyes of the search engines. Your home page at the main domain address, www.yourdomain.com, should contain links to the major categories on your site, and maybe every page if there are a hundred or fewer pages, but other than that, the distinct subjects should stand alone. Furthermore, if a specific subject area is normally broken into smaller divisions academic or professional usage, you should probably follow the same pattern. If your thirty pages about criminal justice are evenly split between pages about detective work and pages about the court system, manage the internal links accordingly.

(Insert Web Diagram Here)

The internal and outgoing links are entirely within your control, but getting valuable incoming links from external sites can be a real challenge for new websites. One of the reasons it's important to get off the couch and put a significant amount of content online is that people aren't going to link to a site that has a pretty design, your biography, and an advertisement for your book. There's no point in asking people for links before you've created a website with something of genuine value, and you'll decrease the chances that those people will even look at your e-mail in the future if you've wasted their time once already. As with much of the home construction industry, website building must be done "on spec", on the speculation that the work you do now is creating value for the future. If you lack the knowledge to say something about a subject that interests you, don't waste your time writing about it, for a book or the web. Write what you know, and if what you know isn't what you want to build a platform on, you have a problem unrelated to web design.