The WebDev Buzz

All website owners and website developers recognize the importance of search engine optimization. Thus, they conducted studies on how search engines come up with their lists. From one point of view, human-powered directories are easier to deal with, since what is primarily needed is excellent and informative content. For crawler-based search engines, the specific method of ranking cannot be revealed.

Still, website gurus have found out that links are important factors considered by the crawler-based engines. The presence of such links can increase the ranking of a website in the list created and updated by search engines. There are two kinds of links, the inbound links and the outbound links.

To determine the difference between the two, here is an illustrative example: A web page in the ABC website has a link that leads to a web page in the XYZ website. This link is considered an outbound link for the ABC website and an inbound link for the XYZ. A link that leads to one’s own website is an inbound link, while a link that can be clicked at one’s own website and leads to another website is an outbound link.

• Inbound link
  The ranking of a website has been found to be affected by the number and quality of inbound links. The search engine Google has revealed that they have a “PageRank calculation” which is based on both characteristics of inbound links: number and quality.This implies that the more inbound links, the higher will be the ranking of the website. And the less inbound links, the lower the ranking. The quality is influenced by the text of the inbound link. This means that the text should contain the relevant keywords of the website.How does a website have an inbound link? If the website has existed long enough and has earned a reputation of being informative, other websites will cite it in their own web pages. But if a website is relatively new, the web marketers and developers of the website should actively seek out another website and arrange a link exchange. That is, both websites will create inbound links for each other. Of course, the people behind a certain website must be careful with the kind of partner website they seek.
• Outbound link
  According to some website marketers, outbound links also influence the ranking, although others are dubious about it. Nevertheless, it will not hurt to have outbound links. If the outbound links of a certain website leads to highly informative and authoritative websites, its credibility is increased, along with its ranking in search engines.The quality of outbound link is also important. For example, a website about astronomy will have greater credibility if it has an outbound link to NASA than if it has an outbound link to horoscopes.

In comparing inbound and outbound links, the former is given more weight. Still, the presence of these two types of link will go a long way in search engine optimization.