Link Density

Links from pages with fewer outbound links have more influence than from pages where
there are huge numbers of links – see FFAs. Additional outbound links dilute the value of
existing links on a page. My suggestion is to accept links from pages with no more than
10 to 12 links. Avoid pages with 20+ external links.

Site and Page Relevance

A link from a site and page carrying similar content would carry more influence than
from a site without the similar content.

Google Page Rank

For Google ranking purposes a link from a high Page Rank site has even greater
influence. A link from a PR 6+ site is extremely valuable. At the other extreme, I suggest
you are prudent when exchanging links with sites of a PR of zero. The PR0 category
contains a number of banned sites.

Key Factors Effecting Link Quality

According to SEO convention and the information gleaned from the Google patents, there
are a number of factors affecting the quality of your inbound links.

SEO 3 – The Off-Site Phase

The off-site phase deals primarily with inbound link building. Amongst the major engines
Google places the greatest emphasis on links. The relevance and quality of these links has a significant influence on the ranking of your site in all of the major engines. The search
engine algorithm interprets each inbound link as a “vote” for a site. Not all links are equal
and therefore the quality of the vote is important in determining the value of the vote.

CSS Format

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is a way of compressing HTML code, allowing
a site to load faster and, in the SEO context, improves the density and priority of
keywords.

Frames & File Size

Frames
Frames cannot be read by the major engines. So in terms of search they are an absolute
no. To find out if your site is utilising frames carry out the cache test on Google.
File Size
Do not make your opening page too large. Even if an engine can read your site many
internet users are still on a dial up connection.

Other File Formats

As at May 2005, Google claims that it is able to read 13 different file types apart from
HTML. The most common non-HTML formats are PDF and MS Office files. From my
experience documents in these two formats can all rank highly. I do, however, have
reservations about some of the other formats and, as mentioned above, particularly Flash.

HTML Code

As has been explained previously, search engines were originally designed to read via
HTML code or code related to it such as XHTML and PHP.

Technical Issues – Site Design and Construction

This section is about avoiding the technical mistakes or pitfalls that may hamper search engine visibility