Kristi Anderson is Managing Editor of the AOL Living sites, including ParentDish.com, Lemondrop.com, StyleList.com, and PawNation.com.

As you might guess, links aren't just important for simple navigation. They're also significant for search engine optimization (SEO), because they're the online equivalent of a personal referral or vote.

Search Engines and Search Queries
Most web traffic is driven by search engines like Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. If your article can't be found by search engines due to insufficient or poorly worded links, you're missing out on tapping into the people who are looking for you.

Search queries, or the words that users type into the search box to find your content, carry huge value. Search engine traffic can make or break your article's success, because this group of targeted visitors provides revenue and exposure like nothing else can. This is why investing in SEO can have a huge rate of return.Back-linking
As a SEED content creator, you may wonder how you can influence our SEO strategy through linking. In addition to paying attention to link frequency and suitable link text, I'd like to introduce you to the concept of back-linking.

Simply put, back-linking is when another website links to your site or article. This is also known as an inbound link. You can post content on another site with a link to your site, and that's a back-link. Or, the owner of another site can include a link to your site. Again, that's a back-link.

Link Lesson #1
As a SEED member, you can make back-links work for you in two ways:

1) Post a link to your article on other sites. If your passion point is pets and you habitually participate in pet forums or read pet sites with commenting capabilities, include links to the most recent pets article you wrote on SEED. If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, back-link to your article by posting it in those places.

(Note: Some forum sites, or sites with comment sections, utilize a 'no follow' link script which basically removes SEO "juice" from your back-link. For the purposes of this article, I'm more concerned that you make it a habit of promoting your article in other external locations to create these back-links.)

2) Link to relevant AOL properties to create back-links for those properties within our network. Be consistent with the URLs used to link to a page. http://aolhealth.com and http://www.aolhealth.com are TWO DIFFERENT URLs to a search engine. Pick the one that comes up in your browser when you navigate to the page you want to link to and stick with it.

PageRank
So, here's why back-linking matters: the more that other sites link to your article page, the greater your PageRank – which basically measure how 'important' your article page is. This might be a term you've heard before. What you might not know is that it's a trademark of Google, named for its founder Larry Page, and not an actual web page.

Google describes PageRank this way:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important'."

The general idea here is the more back-links you have, the higher your pages will be ranked. Rationale would dictate that your website must be important if so many other sites are linking back to it. But, link relevance is also a critical factor; respected sites with similar content as yours that link to you do more to boost your article's or site's search engine rankings than sheer volume. Like most things in life, it's quality over quantity.

The key is to be consistent in your back-linking. Persistence equals higher PageRanks, which all leads to more traffic and visibility for your articles and our AOL sites.

Next: Work That Social Network


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