Link building is the number one most important factor to search engine rankings, yet it is one of the least understood topics. Not all links are treated equally. In fact, many links that webmasters seek out aren’t even counted in Google at all.
If you want to succeed in the search engines, it is crucial that you follow link-building best practices:
Aim for One-Way, High Authority Links from Related Websites
These three factors are the most important factors for determining link quality:
* One way – If the link is reciprocal, Google vastly discount the link.
* High authority – Get links from high authority websites. Getting one link from the New York Times is easily worth more than 10,000 links from brand-new websites. In the past “authority” meant page rank, but today Google takes a lot more than just page rank into account.
* Related – If you have a lot of unrelated sites linking to you, Google will look at your site with suspicion. In natural markets, people link to one another within the same topics and industry. On the other hand, search engine spammers tend to buy links en mass from unrelated websites. Get links from within your industry.
These are the three most important factors for evaluating link quality.
Get a Mix of Link Sources
There are many different websites you can get links from.
* Contextual – This is the best place you can get links from. If your website is mentioned in another website in relevant context, that is viewed very highly in the eyes of Google.
* Static web site links – Getting a link on someone else’s site, especially authority and/or related sites, is viewed highly by Google.
* Blog commenting – Blog commenting used to be an effective way to get ahead in the rankings, but comment spam has gotten commenting downgraded.; however, it can still help your rankings quite a bit.
* Forum postings – Forum postings with a link back to your website in the thread or in a signature can help your rankings as well, especially if the forum is related.
Getting a mix of link sources is the best way to appear organic while receiving a fair volume of inbound links. Don’t just use one technique–se them all.
Anchor Texts and Deep-Linking
Most webmasters link primarily to their home page. If you do that, however, chances are you will miss out on a lot of link-juice opportunities to get sub-pages ranked.
Instead of sending all your links to your home page, link to relevant subpages. Get these ranked for long tail keywords. Your home page will also gain in ranking as a result. Focus on getting back-links to pages deep in your website.
Also, make sure your anchor texts are relevant to the page they are linking to, rather than your home page. Anchor text is extremely important in determining the relevance of the link.
These are some of the more important link-building practices for getting ranked in the search engines. Diversify your link sources, deep link, get the right anchor texts and aim for high authority, related one-way links.
