There is no question that website traffic from Search Engines is an important marketing consideration.

And links from other websites are considered an integral part of a comprehensive Search Engine

Optimization (SEO) strategy

Those who research how Search Engines rank website pages will tell you that good SEO is a

combination of 3 primary ingredients:

1.

On-page factors

2. Off-page factors

3. Page Rank (Google); Web Rank (Yahoo)

On-page factors are those attributes of a specific website page. The most important are keyword

density found in body, title and description tags. Google claims to evaluate 130 attributes of every pages

but it is unlikely that all these attributes influence their Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

But all the important search engines have acknowledged that webmasters can manipulate their on-page

factors to an extent that makes this ingredient a secondary factor in their ranking algorithm.

Off-page factors are the links that appear on other website pages and are considered by many as the

most important ingredient for 2 reasons.

1. They are considered a 3rd party reference of your website.

2. Links on some one else's website are difficult to manipulate.

Page Rank is a quantifiable method of determining the interconnection of any one website page to other

website pages. The more connections or links, the higher the Page Rank score. This quantifiable

measure is patented by Google and named after one of the Google founders, Mr. Lawrence Page.

Yahoo claims to have a similar measure called Web Rank available on their toolbar, but at the time of this

writing, it is not functional and little is known about how the number is calculated.

The rest of this document is devoted to a discussion of Off-page factors, their importance, construction,

reputation and relevancy.

As discussed briefly above, links that reside on other websites are considered a very important ingredient

for all the major search engines. That is because there is lots of information implied in a link and links

that reside on another website are difficult to attain and manipulate.

A link to your website is often described as a vote for your website. The assumption is that other

webmasters are very particular to whom they link. Webmaster prefer linking to websites that they believe

their visitors would find interesting and want to be associated with.

Since links are under the control of another webmaster, search engines consider them less prone to

manipulation and compared to on-page factors, a better indicator of what a website page is really about.

But this does not mean that off-page factors are completely free of manipulation. In fact, the necessity of

links for search engine rankings has birthed a cottage industry. Link exchange businesses that will attain

link from other websites on your behalf are now common. Some webmasters have created multiple

websites for the expressed purpose of linking these sites together, thus, forming a link ring. Others have

created directory websites for exchanging links known as "link farms" or "free link communities".

But there is another problem that the search engines don't talk about too much. Sometimes a legitimate

website might link to another website with or without knowledge that the other has adult content. Search

engines may rank the legitimate website well for its keywords. But if the legitimate website has an

outbound link to an adult content site, visitors may find themselves on a website page they did not