We’ve created a new Internet specialty at Names@Work. Linkology.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we got some nice offers from companies who need quality links. A good Linkologist can make quite a huge difference for the traffic of a web site or a blog.

As part of our project with Farrar, Straus and Giroux (more about that in a later post), we’ve been thinking about how to link out, and we’re now Bona Fide Experts.

Not all links are created equal. Some are better than others. Links to relevant content on other sites can increase your search engine ranking — and improve the quality of your site for your readers. How you choose your links (and what you use as anchor text) can is critical because that’s how a search engine knows that the link is relevant (or not). And WHO you send relevant links to is a major determinant of the amount of traffic you get.

Knowing the who, how, why, and how often of linking out is the bailiwick of the Linkologist.

Any good blogger will tell you that link love is the life-blood of a working blog. Link out to people, and if you’re doing something relevant and interesting, chances are they’ll link back. SEO experts will tell you that good anchor text is important for helping search engines determine the relevance of your links. No-one should have to tell you getting a link from a popular blog (because you linked to them) can be a gold mine.

Here then are some rules for Linkology excellence:

1. Make sure that your anchor text is relevant. If you’re linking to Copyblogger, make sure your link text is CopyBlogger, not “click here”.
2. Link to content that is actually relevant to what you’re talking about. No-brainer? You’d be surprised. Google cares even if you don’t.
3. Link to blogs, because they might link back. The more popular the blog the better. You can check popularity based on links at Technorati, or use some of the other tools for finding influential bloggers. Note that online, “influential” and “popular” are difficult to distinguish.
4. Within the limits of readability (you do want people to actually read your page), more links are better.
5. Forums are good too. There’s a lot going on in forums, and the moderators (who, like bloggers, check their stats incessantly) are active. Remember, you want links coming back to you, so you want someone to notice that you’ve scratched their back, so they can scratch yours.
6. There is some anecdotal evidence about outbound links, which common sense would confirm, that readers are more likely to click earlier links than later ones. If you want people to read further down your page, you may want not put links, especially strong ones, in the first sentence.
7. If you’re linking to a non-interactive site, such as a static web site, try to pick the most authoritative. The top-level domain of the site can be a good guide. Anyone can buy a .com or a .net, but you have to be a verified institution of higher learning to get a .edu domain name — and they’re worth more because of it. In order of “link-juiciness”, use .int, .gov, .mil, .edu, .org. After that I don’t think there’s much difference.
8. Keeping readers is good, so don’t continually link to the same source. If every link is to Wikipedia, readers are going to ask themselves why they don’t just skip your site and spend their time over there.

I know there are some excellent Linkologists out there, even if you never called yourself that.

Did I miss anything?

Tags: links, linkology, linkologist, top-level domains, outbound links, forums

Posted by Antony in: Blogs, Domains, Media + Marketing, Search