Search Engine Optimization: A Study of importance of inbound & outbound

Links and other SEO key factors in achieving better SERP position
Muhammad Iqbal1, Department of Computer Science,Bahria University Karachi Campus, & School of
Information Sciences & Technology

Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China

Email: miqbal.bukc@bahria.edu.pk

Malik Muneeb Abid2 ,Department of Civil Engineering, International Islamic University, Islamabad.

muneeb.abid@iiu.edu.pk

Faraz Humayoun, Department of Electrical Engineering, Bahria University Karachi Campus

Kamran Rasheed, Department of Computer Science, Bahria University Karachi Campus, Email:
Kamranrasheed450@gmail.com

Muhammad Noman, Department of Computer Science, Bahria University Karachi Campus, Email:
NomanKhalid.bukc@bahria.edu.pk

Abstract

Search Engines (SEs) have become most significant tool for retrieving information from World Wide Web or
simply Web against end user generated queries. Presently, the size of Internet is growing exponentially in three
different directions i.e. size, processing power, & software cleverness. The Web is a stack of sophisticated
software technologies to access hypertext documents from Internet. Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are
examples of differentsoftware implementation stages of Web. In order to reach a large audience of Internet, It is
most significant for every business owner to have a website. However, to reach more viewers, a website must
be visible on top of Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

This paper introduces the important concepts of SEO and providesnumerous optimization guiding principles.
Some negative practices, or “black hat SEO” approaches, to improve website ranking are briefly discussed.
Finally, the paper concludes with the role of link building in for optimizing websites.

Keyword: SEO ,External Links ,SERP

1.0 Introduction

The Internet (worldwide computer network) has provided wide range of benefits to people in variety of ways,
such as now people can maintain social connections and support community networks that otherwise wouldn't
be possible, and can retrieve important information than ever before. Simply, they can use internet for
education, work, communication, and for entertainment purposes. Whereas, World Wide Web (WWW), or
simply Web is a leading information retrieval service of the giant network i.e. Internet. The Web has given an
opportunity to end- users to access vast array of documents. The end-users can jump from one document to
another document by simply clicking on URL. The Web is big place and it holds largest repository ever built. In
year 2012, Google reveal that it has indexes more than 30 trillion web pages [2].Moreover, the same source
reported 130 Trillion individual web pages indexed by Google in year 2016. The extensive use of Web for
 variety of applications and vital role of Search Engines (SEs) for information retrieval attracts the individuals
and companies to be part of this repository.

Our Web platform is classified into three versions i.e. Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0; and these version
numbers describes the usage of different web technologies and their resultant applications in them [1]. Table-1
illustrates the comparison among different web technologies.

Table 1. Comparison of web technology

WEB 1.0 WEB 2.0 WEB 3.0

Read Only Read/Write Semantic
Web Web Web Web Web Web
technology applications technology applications technology applications
HTML Static HTML, Dynamic, Artificial Eurekster,
Websites, AJAX Wikis, Intelligence, AskWiki,
Important
features

which do not JSCRIPT MySpace, XML, RDF Twine

provide the
facility of
feedback from
users.

The Web has had a remarkable progress since its advent and its different versions are simply different evolution
stages of the Internet. In Web 1.0 the websites were hold static contents. The second stage of Web evolution is
termed as Web 2.0 and deals with dynamic contents of web site and Web 3.0 focuses on web services and
semantic markup.

1.1 Search Engines

Today, the Web user‟s first choice to find specific information is SE. SEs can be thought as answering machines
which produce list of documents against end-users generated queries. This list of documents is also known as Search
Engine Result Page (SERP). Google, Bing ,Yahoo! and Baidu are some common examples of widely used SEs.

Figure 1 Global Market Share of SEs

The market share of different search engines are reported in [3]. Figure 1shows the global marketing share in terms
of percentage. It is interesting to note from graph that majority of the people in the world use Google for retrieving
their desired information, however other SEs are also trying capture market share. According another Internet
research company i.e. Internet live stats[4] has shared searches per day analysis for different search engines. The
number of internet users are increasing exponentially and figure 2‟s data supports this argument, Simply more than
6 billion searches are performed on different search engines worldwide. Another interesting fact is Mobile device
search has surpasses the desktop searches .

Figure 2 Searches per Day

1.2 Motivation for High Ranking

The Search Engine software performs two major jobs i.e. crawling and creating ranked documents index. When an
end user input search query to SE, it tries to provides a most relevant results in the shape of SERP. According to one
study which was conducted by famous web-analysis-company[5], the top listing in SERP is 95% organic search
results traffic, compared to only 5% in-organic traffic( See figure 3). The same study additionally reveals that 1st
position in Google‟s SERP is 33% of the total organic traffic. Mostly people believes that the website which
receives the 1st position on SERP is most useful and relevant website against given search term. Due to this fact,
majority of website owners are always eager to achieve a 1st page result for keywords relevant to their website.
Figure 3 Organic vs In-organic search

Different studies reveals that in most of the cases the SE users only clicks on first to three pages (links) of SERP .
Ruffolo[6] study showed that the websites with the top rank i.e. first position on SERP get 42% of the organic
traffic; the second position gets 11% and third gets 8% only. The data shows the top three search results combining
for almost 61% of the entire SERP listing. This top three result area is also known as Golden Triangle because most
of the web users only concentrate their attentions on a triangular area covering the first three websites.

Figure 4 Percent of traffic by BING result

The top SERP Rank impotence can be summarized as follows:

1. It means that your website contents will be appear as a leader on WEB;

2. Your website becomes a business development front;
3. increased media attention.
Due to above mentioned reasons the web site designers and site owners are mostly interested to earn top position on
SERP. Simply, imagine that if the webpage of a business company is on lower SERP rank then the probability to
generate business becomes less.

2.0 Important Design factors of Business Website

The web is a fact of business life, so all business companies (entrepreneurs, micro, medium, and large) need their
presence online to attract potential customers. Beside the use of other marketing tools, the use of Internet could help
the prospective customers to find about your product or services through SEs.

Presently, a large number of businesses do not have their own website, which could result in loosing potential
customers[7]. In order to be part of largest repository i.e. www, the organization must have website. Table 2
summarizes the benefits of website.

Table 2:Key benefits of websites to improve business

S.No Reason Description
1 Cost Effective Best employee of your company ( Never Sleep )
2 Accessible around the clock Websites are accessible 24/7/365
3 Convenient Convenient way for buying goods without moving to markets
4 Credibility Through website, you can continuously serve consumers online &
increase your credibility as a business owner.
5 Sales To be visible worldwide means you are very likely to gain
more customers.
6 Marketing Online marketing strategies have been proven to be effective tool for
business growth. Promote your website through marketing tools such as
Google My Business.

At present, unfortunately the use of website to promote business is limited to midsize and large organizations. Small
business owners; specially in the Pakistan does not have online presence at all. In fact, majority of small business
organizations view their businesses as offline unit, and pursuing traditional approaches to reach new customers.
However, we believe that considering business as offline entity is a risky tactic to achieve business goals; specially
when majority of people are spending maximum their time online.

It‟s the first thing visitors take into consideration when deciding to stay or leave. Your site must be inviting.

In order to earn maximum benefits from web, the business website should equipped with some significant design
factors. The most influential factors are listed below:

 Aesthetic appearance: The first impression of a specific website determines the user willingness to stay or
leave the website. The attractiveness of a website can be achieved through visual features, such as proper
use of images, icons, color scheme etc
 Responsive. Responsive webpage design technology makes web page look good on all computing devices
 Speed. The web page load time is also a significant factor and mostly it can contribute to the rise and fall
of your conversion rate.
 Site Layout. It is not a good practice to put excessive information on one page; so in order to attract
potential customers the website design and layout should be looks inviting by having detail layout structure
of site. The better layout helps the customers to retrieve desired information in quick manner.
 Content. Valuable and fresh content is a key of getting better ranking score from SEs. In short, your
content must force website visitors to stay on site for long time.
 Keywords. Keywords are important for SEs to retrieve information from web, so adding extremely
relevant keywords in website contents could be helpful for website owners to earn better ranking.
  Call To Action (CTA). A call to action is a prompt on a website that request the end-users to take some
specified action. CTA is usually presented as button that says, “30 free trial‟ „Sign Up‟ or „Buy Now‟ etc.
 Social Media Links. Adding Social Networking Sites (SNS) increases the probability to gain more traffic
from potential customers and thereby getting improved ranking from SEs.

3.0 SEO Practices

SEO is an important term to any organization that operates online. SEO can be defined as technical, analytical and
creative process to improve the visibility of a website on SERP. SEO is classified into Inorganic & organic search.
Furthermore, organic search is divided into on-page & off-page, and additionally these tactics classified into White
hat, Black hat and Gay hat (See figure 5).

Figure 5 SEO classification

One of the most important aspects of SEO is making website easy for both end users and search engine robots to
understand.
3.1 White hat is a positive practice used by website creator to improve ranking position of their site strictly
according to guidelines of SEs. White hat is an ethical way to earn SERP ranking; however it is
considerably slower if we compare it with black hat, but receive long lasting ranking position.
Below list is some important components of white hat:
 Quality content
 Keyword research
 Title & Meta data
 Quality inbound links
 Search Engine optimized coding structure

3.2 Black hat SEO refers to negative practice that is employed on website to increases a site rank on SERP
through unfair means that violate the SEs guidelines, some of these negative practices include:
 Keyword Stuffing
 Content Automation
 Doorway Pages
 Hidden Text or Links
 Link farm
 Cloaking
 Automated queries to Search Engines
3.3 Gray hat is a based on middle ground philosophy between black hat & white hat SEO technique. Some of
these methods are:
 Un-naturally high keyword density
 Duplicate content across different websites
 Irrelevant link building

3.4 The SEO can be divided into two different types: On-Page and Off-Page SEO. Both types are crucial for
improving the organic search engine ranking. In order to understand the difference between these two
approaches we must understand the key ranking signals (On-Page & Off-Page) of SEs.
On-Page SEO deals with only your website different parts that affect search engine ranking, while Off-
Page specifically focuses on authority of your website by receiving links from other sites. The main search
ranking contributing factors of on-page & off-page are depicted in figure 6.

Figure 6 On-Page & Off-Page factors

4.0 The Web & External Links
The WWW is an application of graph theory, where graph is made up of vertices ((Nodes or dots ) and Edges (arcs
or lines ). Mathematically the web can be defined as follows:

𝐺 = (𝑉, 𝐸) …….(1)

Where V= V(G) is a set of vertices

E=E(G) is a set of edges

A simple web with four nodes is shown in figure 7.

Figure 7 A Small Web Graph of 4 nodes

Here V= { A,B,C,D}
E= {(A,C),(A,B),(B,C),(C,D)}

Our WEB is full of links (edges) and nodes[8]. Each time when we click a link, simply it means, we are traveling
from a one webpage to another.

External links is a SEO term, which means that these are links (hyperlinks) that points to any domain other than the
domain the link exists on (source). Figure 8 describes the classification of external links. In SEO industry,
understanding the outbound and inbound links is essential for website developers. The external links can be broken
down into two types, shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8 Classification of external links

Inbound links (a.k.a backlinks) is a link on another domain that is pointing to your website. Backlinks are very
important ranking signal for obtaining better SERP position because SEs take backlinks as a confidence vote of
other website on your website. A simple example of backlinks is shown in figure 9.
Figure 9 A Simple example of Backlinks

All major SEs take inbound links as most influential factor to decide the rank position of specific webpage. In short,
a good number of back links will increase the probability for achieving top ranking position on SERP. However, low
quality inbound links can damage your site reputation in SEs. Table 3 presents some key benefits of inbound links.

Table 3: Inbound links significance for websites

S.No Reason
1 Rank position
2 Improve Authority
3 Faster Indexing
4 Increase Visitors
Description
Backlinks from high authority websites will improve your ranking in SERP.
Increase your domain authority and credibility
Inbound links help search engine to discover your web pages.
Quality inbound links also bring high traffic volume

Outbound links are links of your website that are targeting to other website. These links are equally good in deciding
the authority of your site in SEs. Different studies shows that pointing to relevant and authoritative websites have a
helpful impact on SERP ranking. Webmaster has a full control on outbound links.

There are two kinds of outbound links, i.e. no-follow link and the do=follow link. The do-follow link is the default
link and we don‟t have to add any information to the html code. It passes on Google PageRank juice from your
webpage to the targeted webpage, while no-follow link is the abnormal link. It does not pass on any Google
PageRank juice to the targeted webpage but instead, it blocks off the Google PageRank flow. A no-follow link has a
rel=”no-follow” tag inside the code. This tag says to the Google spider „not to follow‟ the link. To make a concept
clear, take a look at the simple example in figure 9.

Figure 10No-follow tag Link example

 External links pass "link juice" (ranking power) differently than internal links because the SEs considers
them as third-party votes. The usage of internal & external links is provided in figure 10.

Figure 11 External vs. Internal Links

5.0 A Successful Business website: Lessons learned

Nowadays, a vast majority of consumers heavily rely on search engines for taking business purchase decisions.
Moreover, latest technology tools such as website can help organizations to reach large audience of globe. Presently,
different open source content management systems are helping small business organizations to create business
website without professional website designers, but without the earning of top SERP position the companies could
not achieved its business goals.

Google is using more than 200 different factors to rank websites, but deferent research groups reported various
important factors to achieve top position on SERP. For example Charles et.al.[9] discussed four significant factors in
their study i.e. information completeness, credibility, usability, and persuasiveness.SEO rules and its importance is
extensively discussed in [10-14].

However, we are reporting 7 significant factors in our study, which could be kept in mind when developing, and
mainlining, websites to gain competitive advantages of businesses and to earn better SERP position:

Design of a website: Before creation of the website, the website developer should have a proper plan i.e. design
goals. Simply, a good planned website is a key factor in success of business organization. Simple, clean and elegant
website is vital rule for successful business website.

Performance: Usually at the time of planning the website developer tend to rely on cheap pricing plan, which may
be a poor decision for company website. It is very important for website developer to focus on benefits of well-
performing web-hosting servers. Website viewers irritates with too slow or frequently downed websites and they
usually think this as company‟s fault, so the selection of wrong website hosting company will be terrible for
company.

Target Market: Listen to intended audience market and tailor your website contents which must appeal the
potential customers. Considering customers requirements is far more important than company or developer thinking.

Responsive: The website should be compatible with mobile devices.

Security: Mostly, website owners put less emphasis on the security issues and doing this they forget the possible
cyber threats which could harm the potential customers. A good number of features must be part me business
website.

Fresh Contents: The contents must be relevant and fresh. It is a good practice to reserve some budget to keep site
up-to-date. Additionally, content should also free from spelling mistakes, free from typos and grammatical errors.

SEO Usage: Nowadays, SEO is more essential than ever and it is crucial for every webmaster to realize the affects
of SEO on business website. The proper implementation of ON-PAGE & OFF-PAGE can bring business website
on top listing of SERP.

6.0 Conclusion
The purpose of this study is to find out the key factors which must be addressed when designing a business website.
One of the main contributions of our paper has been the survey of significant aspects of quality websites and that
encourage website administrators to employ in their future website projects. It can be observed from our study that
business websites popularity can be achieved through the use of external links & the use of SEO best practices.

In order to achieve long lasting results, the website creator must employ white hat SEO methods instead of black
hat because improving the web traffic derived from organic results allows website owners to enjoy top SERP
ranking for longer period.

This study concludes that, website owners must put maximum emphasis on search engine optimization for the better
SERP ranking.
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