As the saying goes, tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are. You’re probably wondering what it has to do with the search engines and SEO? Well, since we’re still living in an era when AI still has a long way to go before it deserves being called intellect, search engines cannot really determine relevance of a web page by just looking at the content. They have to examine external factors in order to rank a webpage. By external factors I mean what other pages link to it or in other words in what neighborhood your page stands.
Suppose you run a sports related website. How does Google know the topic of your site? Sure it can decipher the theme of your site from the content on your webpages. But then again there are millions of sites with similar content (I mean they all are about sports). So how does the search engine determine which ones are most relevant to a users query? Right, it looks at what other sites link to it.
Now if you’re linked to from sports related websites, especially the ones that are considered authority in the niche, you’ll score more ‘relevance points’ and will rank higher in the search engines for specific keywords. To be more exact you’ll rank well for the keywords used in the anchor texts of incoming links pointing at your site. If a lot of websites link to you with ‘football news’ in the anchor text you’ll rank high for ‘football news’, if there are a lot of links with ‘baseball teams’ you’ll rank for that keyword as well.
Although it’s an oversimplified interpretation and search engine algorithms are much more complicated, basically this is how the whole thing works. The more links you get the higher you rank as long as the sites linking to you are relevant to your niche. If you start getting links from gambling or adult sites this is where the search engines raise a red flag.
That’s what link neighbourhood is all about. If the sites linking to you are related quality resources you get a boost in your rankings. If you’re linked to from dubious resources this may hurt your rankings. Obviously you can’t prevent websites from linking to you if they want to, but you can at least stay away from bad neighborhoods when building links.
The other side of your linking neighborhood is the sites that you link out to from your web pages. This is also taken into account by the search engines and if you link out to quality established resources this should give you some weight in the search results. This is an arguable point like many other things in SEO but it makes perfect sense from a purely logical point of view. Anyway whether you decide to link out to your niche authorities or not you should certainly avoid linking to poor quality or unrelated websites or sites that are themselves linked to or from dubious resources. This way you’ll avoid trouble from Google bans and penalties and will ensure good standing and high search engine rankings of your website.

If you are new internet marketers intending to promote clients’ websites or new business owners aspiring to be on-line merchants then one of your primary concerns is to buy an SEO software that would help you in automating your SEO tasks. In doing so, you would want to read SEO software reviews. By using a good SEO software, your clients or your websites will easily be seen by your target on-line customers or audience so that you can market and sell your clients’ or your products or services in the internet. Having such a business objective then will definitely lead you to look into the different methods of promoting the said above products or services on the internet whether it be manually or through computer software. Most likely, if you are a busy individual then you will opt to look into computer software solutions to save on valuable time. In either case, what you would want is to get your client’s or your website to the top ten (10) of Google’s search page when their niche keywords are searched so that you can get the web traffic you need and convert those number of website visits or popularly referred to as ” hits” into sales orders. For those new to this art and science, it’s called search engine optimization or the acronym SEO in short.
To explain it briefly to the uninitiated like would be on-line merchants, it is the part of website ownership where business owners want their websites rank high in search engine searches possibly in the first page of their niche keyword or key phrase searches. Similarly, by the same token it is also what would be internet marketers want for their clients’ websites. The higher or closer the websites to the top of the search pages for particular keyword (s) or key phrase(s) the better, as surfers normally click on the websites they see right away which are usually on the first pages. Consequently, most of the time, surfers just click away after seeing and visiting the websites on the first pages of search queries thinking that succeeding pages have less relevant or important content or information to what they are searching for. This is precisely the reason why internet marketers want their sites listed on most search engines’ first pages.
With the growing demand for this business need, as more and more websites are created daily, software developers had to create software programs based on intelligent algorithms search engines use to rank websites in searching for particular keywords or key phrases. These SEO software have some basic features that are common in all and have features unique to their proprietary designs.
And of course, being an intelligent consumer checking out your options, your next step would be to ask around. But as you’ll find out sooner than later, the best and quickest method really would be to surf the internet and read about SEO software reviews. And by reading various reviews on the subject, you would be able to compare the different features each one has to offer. Likewise, you would be able to find out which SEO software suits your needs and budget. Overall, your criteria should be based on their functionality or what features or functions they have, ease of use of their web interfaces, customers’ ratings & testimonials and affordability or price.