SEO Link Relevancy

Link Relevancy

As search engines matured, they started identifying more metrics for
determining rankings. One that stood out among the rest was link
relevancy.

The difference between link relevancy and link popularity (discussed in
the previous section) is that link relevancy does not take into account the
power of the link. Instead, it is a natural phenomenon that works when
people link out to other content.


Let me give you an example of how it works. Say I own a blog where I write about whiteboard markers.
 (Yes, I did just look around my office for
an example to use, and yes, there are actually people who blog about whiteboard markers. I checked.) 
Ever inclined to learn more about my
passion for these magical writing utensils, I spend part of my day reading online what other people have to say about whiteboard markers.




On my hypothetical online reading journey,I find an article about the
psychological effects of marker color choice. Excited, I go back to my
website to blog about the article so (both of) my friends can read about it.
Now here is the critical takeaway. When I write the blog post and link to the
article, I get to choose the anchor text. I could choose something like “click
here,” but more likely I choose something that it is relevant to the article. In
this case I choose “psychological effects of marker color choice.”
Someone else who links to the article might use the link anchor text
“marker color choice and the effect on the brain.”

People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either
the domain name or the title of the page. Use this to your advantage by
including keywords you want to rank for in these two elements.
This human-powered information is essential to modern-day search
engines. These descriptions are relatively unbiased and produced by real
people. This metric, in combination with complicated natural language
processing, makes up the lion’s share of relevancy indicators online.
Other important relevancy indicators are link sources and information
hierarchy. For example, the search engines can also use the fact that I
linked to the color choice article from a blog about whiteboard markers to
supplement their understanding of relevancy. Similarly, they can use the
fact that the original article was located at the URL
www.example.com/vision/color/ to determine the high-level positioning and

Relevancy of the content. 

Beyond specific anchor text, proximal text—the certain number of
characters preceding and following the link itself—have some value.
Something that’s logical, but annoying is when people use a verb as
anchor text, such as “Frank said . . . “ or “Jennifer wrote . . .“, using “said” or
“wrote” as the anchor text pointing back to the post. In a situation like that,
engines have figured out how to apply the context of the surrounding copy
to the link.

Tying Together Popularity and Relevancy

So far in this post I have discussed both popularity and relevancy.
These two concepts make up the bulk of Search Engine Optimization
theory. They have been present since the beginning of search engines and
undoubtedly will be important in the future. The way they are determined
and the relationship between them changes, but they are both fundamental
to determining search results.

Popularity and relevancy are the two concepts that make up the bulk of
Search Engine Optimization theory.
This fact is critical to SEOs. We have very little control over how the
major search engines operate, yet somehow we are supposed to keep our
jobs. Luckily, these immutable laws of popularity and relevance govern
search engines and provide us with some job security.