Incoming links to your websites are like votes for your website.  If there are competing websites and one site has 300 links and another site has 20, likely the website with 300 links will have better page rank and better Search Engine positions for certain terms.   However there is an art to link building and below are some keys to follow when building links to your website:

1. It is very important for your links to be built naturally, which means don’t go from 1 to 1000 in a day.  Google looks for slow but steady link building that looks natural instead of artificial.
2. Ensure you links are from authoritative sites with high PageRank (4 to 6 PageRank is excellent) and try to get links from sites that are on topic, for example if your website is about pets then getting a link from a pet food store would be  a very good link.
3. Try to get links from websites that have few outgoing links.
4. Avoid run-of-site links, these are links that come from every page on a website that point to your home page.  This looks unofficial in the eyes of the Search Engines.
5. Try to get the keywords that you want to rank for in the link text of the link that is linking to you.  For example if you want better search engine positioning for “Pet Collars Winnipeg” then try to get links from a website that uses Pet Collars Winnipeg and the link points to the page on your website that you want to rank for this key term.
6. If you are building a lot of links ensure that all your links do not point to the home page of your website, this looks artificial so ensure some links are going to interior pages (these are called deep links).
7. Ensure that you are not building links from websites that do not follow links (source code: rel=”nofollow”).  This means that the search engines will not give you any credit this link from this website.
8. Try to get links from your suppliers, customers and trade directories.
9. Don’t waste a lot of time on reciprocal links, they are losing their power with regards to search engine optimization.
10. Remember that links do not produce online sales or leads, so ensure that the links that you are gathering have a good chance of driving visitors that will be interested in your product or service.

Following these tips will certainly help your search optimization, good luck.

This entry was posted by John McDonald on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 11:26 am and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.