Tips for effective link building

Optimizing the content of your web site is only part of the equation for improved search engine rankings. Most major search engines also rely on link popularity to determine the most relevant web sites for a particular search.

Here are some tips and benefits for an active link building program:

Improve search engine rankings
Search engines rank pages of web sites based on many different factors and each major search engine uses unique algorithms for determining relevancy. One factor that all major search engines use to some degree is link popularity. If two sites are have equally relevant content, but one has a larger number of high quality links than another, the site with more links will often rank higher.

If your site contains quality content, then other sites will link to you because of the content. An active link building campaign will speed up this process. However, your goal is not to acquire a large number of links in a short amount of time, but to gain them at a steady pace.

What's important is to find "quality" sites that have related content and ask them to link to you using text that includes your keywords. Avoid reciprocal linking or link exchanges. Many, many sites are abusing this method of linking and search engines will soon discount the value of any links shared directly between two sites that do not match certain criteria.

Quality is better than quantity.
By "quality" I mean sites that you need links from need to be considered authority sites on topics related to your own site. These include subject matter resource sites, publications, etc. Sites with .org, .edu are often favored by Google. Chances are, there are many web sites and blogs out there with a subject matter theme similar to your site. Most web sites that explicitly present links pages will require you to link back. When this happens, ask yourself if you would like to this type of site anyway - even without a link back.

Also determine if the page where your site will be listed is related directly to your site? The page that is linking to your site should have less than 40 links on it to other sites. 40 is not a hard number, but the lower the number of outgoing links the better. The links to other sites should follow a similar subject matter theme as your web site. For example, all "auto" related links or "real estate". If the links go to many different types of sites and are unorganized or categorized, there is little value for you. If the links page has many, many links it may not be of any value at all.

How to find links.
Go to google.com and do a search for one of your keyword phrases. Check each of the top 10 sites in the search results to see if there are opportunities for you to get a link back to your site.

You could also search Google and Yahoo using your keywords plus phrases like, "add site". Example: keyword phrase "add site" or keyword phrase "submit site". These queries may result in sites that are open to accepting links.

Additional linking tactics include:
* Getting articles syndicated on other sites with your company link included
* Press releases with links back to your site
* Offering non-profit web sites a donation in exchange for a link on their "donors"?? or "supporters"?? page
* Creating extremely useful content and resources on your site. This will attract links that you won´t even know about 24/7

There are many other ways to find links so be sure to watch as you surf the web for link opportunities.

Remember, when you get links from other sites to yours, it is important that they are text links and that the text includes your keywords. Also, you don´t need to use the same keywords with each link. Also, links from other sites to your specific product or services pages are very helpful.

Example:
Link Title: Securence Anti Spam Software
Link URL: http://www.securence.com/email_filtering/product_overview.htm
Link Description: Complete anti spam and antivirus solutions for individuals and companies with a 30 day free trial.

By attracting links to important content within your site, you can build more focused link popularity for improved rankings in those areas.

To Reciprocal Link or Not?
Avoid reciprocal links. Focus on one-way inbound links. It's good to have a resources page pre-populated with links to authority sites in your industry. These would be one-way links out to other industry, association or resources web sites. Try to keep the number of links you have going out to other sites to a minimum compared to the number of links coming in. If it really makes sense to trade links with another site, you can use your resources page to link to them.

Building links to drive traffic directly to your site can also help build your link popularity. Just keep in mind that text links are ideal and they should include keywords relevant to the page you're linking to. Set aside a few hours per week to research new links for your web site and mix up the links between your home page and the major category pages of your web site. Over time you'll build link popularity across your entire site and rankings will follow.