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Most of us read the newspaper daily. A plethora of information, it informs us and gives us opinions on events happening around us. Most of us also have one or two favorite sections as well. For some it would be the politics section, for some it would be the sports section. For others it could the Business section. |
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Now suppose that you are going through the Business section and you realize that most of the news seems to be related to sports and politics. How would you react? You would probably stop subscribing to the newspaper from the next day itself. |
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This is not just true for newspapers and other offline media but applies to the entire gamut of websites, blogs communities, message boards and forums collectively referred to as Online Media. A characteristic feature of online media which differs from traditional offline media is that each web page is linked to a host of web pages thereby forming a mesh of information. An end user can easily navigate from one page to another within the website or outside of the website to external web pages using these links. |
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Using the newspaper example as a reference if you were reading an article on Roger Federer having won the US Open on espn.com and you find an anchor text on George Bush leading to www.whitehouse.gov right in the middle of the article, it wouldn’t make much sense to you right! It wouldn’t make sense to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines either. |
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Text links that are provided within content and refer to content that is contextually similar to the content of the page from where it was referred is known as Contextual Links. |
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| The focus on Contextual Linking has increased manifold with Google and other search engines laying a lot of importance on relevancy and ranking pages accordingly. The algorithm looks at the following in evaluating links on a website |
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- The number of incoming links,
- The quality of the incoming links,
- The anchor text used and
- The contextual relevance.
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As such many websites get penalized for putting “off – context” links. On the other hand a number of good contextual links can boost your ranking. Also noteworthy is that one way natural links are accorded the highest weight in evaluating page ranks. You might be wondering as to how one can actually go about building relevant links. |
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Following are the natural methods one can employ |
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- Create relevant and quality Content: There is no substitute to good content. It is the foundation stone for any online marketing campaign. A good article is bound to attract visitors and references to your page.
- Use Press Releases to make your website visible to other websites: Press releases also allow readers to link back to your website
- Write articles and submit them on relevant article directories that provide for back links to your site as well.
- Blog submissions on relevant blogs: The drawback to this method is that most blogs, forums and Community do not allow for indexing on the major search engines through a ‘nofollow’ tag. However with the increasing prominence of web 2.0 a lot of traffic can be generated. Good content can attract a lot of good opinions and hence a lot of book marking and tagging of your web page/pages.
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There are a lot of black hat techniques available in the market as well. However in the event of detection, it can result in your site getting penalized. Stick to the basics and Google shall reward you eventually with good page ranks. |
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What are Contextual Links?
