In the last article, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, were going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain high quality links. Were also going to talk briefly about Googles PageRank.

First, lets examine a regular link. Its a piece of text (or image, but were going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are

1) The address which it links to

2) The text of the link

3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Lets analyze this information one by one. First, youd naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blogs home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Lets say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says Barbie dolls and links to your blog. Doesnt make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms technological or gadget, it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, its essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Googles PageRank. Its basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Googles robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Googles search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Googles robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blogs PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targetted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine results.