Two main components of search engine optimization are content and links.
“Content is King” has been the mantra for years (many now claim that “Content Curation is King”, but I digress). The point is that the content is very important.
Close attention should also be paid to link building. In fact, links are the “currency” of the World Wide Web; is the roadmap for Google bots and web crawlers. Unfortunately, but to the best of our knowledge, the actual relative link value of any given individual link has never been chartered. That being said, there is a general consensus among SEO professionals as to the value of links.
The following link hierarchy chart shows, from highest to lowest, the perceived value of any given inbound link. The value of a link pointing to your page content is important because of its ability to pass the link “juice” (value or authority) to a given page. If you’re hoping to achieve a high page one ranking on major search engines for highly competitive keywords, then it’s going to require some serious link “juice” to achieve your goal, presumably the #1 spot on the SERPs for your targeted keywords. .
Trying to quantify this issue is an ongoing debate and will continue to be flexible and ever-changing. As Google makes changes to its algorithm, like the now infamous Panda update, the value of links will change afterwards. In general, links from high authority sites will give you more link juice than links from low quality sites, which can be easily manipulated by spammers.
Link Hierarchy: (this is an approximation and should be used as a general guide)
High value
Page that has a significant number of links pointing to it
Permanent Links: Press Releases, Published Articles
Highly ranked page for a particular main or long-tail keyword with a similar theme as landing page
PR4+ content
High traffic rank from Alexa
Main world directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, with high Page Rank
Ranked page with few outbound links pointing to other sites
Any voluntary inbound hyperlink acquired “naturally” from the same industry
.Edu and .Gov Authorities
Middle value
Blogs that are self-hosted vs. free blogs
Home Page Fonts
Variable anchor text links from indexed sites
Links originating with page placement near the top or header section
RSS feeds and blog scrolls
Links from root domains vs. links from subdomains or subdirectories
Sites with high domain rank or established domain trust
Static URL, or any regularly crawled (i.e. Spidered) content
links and from web sites/pages that have been published for several years (their authority is given to old domains)
High PR pages that do not use the No-Follow tag (although no-follow is declining)
Directory listing as long as the page has minimal outgoing links (may be moving down the list in terms of value)
Contextual links that originate from the page content of the same site (the actual post or article)
Links with surrounding contextual content that matches the anchor text
Keyword Rich Anchor Text Links
Pages with complementary and related topics
Links to social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) (may be moving up the list in terms of value)
Author biographical resource areas (common in article directories like EzineArticles)
lowest value
Low-value directories obtained from directory submissions
Free blogs and forums
Dynamically generated pages
Unrelated topic sites
Resource pages with fewer than 15 outbound links
Footer and sidebar links
Incoming bookmarks where other users bookmark your pages (quality bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon still have value)
reciprocal links
