Basic Link Building Strategies

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

One of the trickiest aspects of search engine optimization is the process of building high quality incoming links. And, as you’ve undoubtedly heard, it’s also the single most important thing you can do to improve your rankings. The more quality inbound links a page has, the more popular and relevant that page is - and search engines like popular, relevant pages.  It is therefore of paramount importance that you learn both what kind of links the search engines like as well as how to go about getting those links.  In order to answer this question it is important to take the search engine’s point of view when building your incoming link structure.  Indeed, most (if not all) of our link-building strategies flow from that basic principle.

With that said, here are 7 basic link-building strategieswhich form the backbone of a successful and profitable link building campaign:

1. Create a natural incoming link structure.
2. Get quality links from quality sites.
3. Get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links.
4. Go for deep links.
5. Make sure that the URL format of your referring links are consistently identical.
6. Avoid linking to low quality web sites.
7. Remember that profits are your goal.
    

Creating a natural incoming link structure.

A key point to remember when building links is that search engines like a natural link structure and they hate artificial link structures. That’s why your first link building strategy is to keep your incoming links natural.  Here are some of the differences between a natural link structure and an artificial one:

• With naturally generated incoming links, the inbound anchor text varies
  With artificially generated incoming linksthe inbound anchor text identical.

• With naturally generated incoming linksthe inbound link count increases gradually as referral sites add links one by one over time
  With artificially generated incoming links the inbound link count increases suddenly "out of nowhere" to great numbers.

• With naturally generated incoming links the site links-out only to reputable pages (they don’t usually swap links so their outgoing links tend to point to quality pages.
  With artificially generated incoming links the site participates in link swapping, links-out to link farms or web rings or isolated nodes (isolated nodes are page groups linking to each other but lacking inbound links from outside trusted sites).

• With naturally generated incoming links the links are rarely reciprocal.
  With artificially generated incoming links a high percentage of links are reciprocal (when a site has a high percentage of links which are reciprocal it suggests that the sole purpose of the link is reciprocity - having little or nothing to do with adding value for the site visitor by way of providing worthwhile content).

Keeping these facts in mind, one should strive to build the most natural-looking incoming-link structure possible. From a search engine’s point of view (SEPOV), the best kind of links are requested links. The engines are looking to bestow high rankings on only those pages that people voluntarily link to due to great content - not because some webmaster has spent a lot of time swapping links.

 

Get quality links from quality sites.

Not all links are created equal.  Some links can be particularly beneficial to your rankings in the search engines, others hurt your efforts and still others have little to no effect one way or the other.  Given the tremendous importance of incoming links to your site rankings (not to mention the amount of time and effort that goes into attracting these links) it is clearly important to know what kind of links you should spend your time pursuing and which ones you should avoid.  In other words, you need to learn how toevaluate the quality of a link so that you can make sure that you maximize the effectiveness of your link building campaign.

There are, in essence, six aspects of a link that are worth noting. They are:

1. Your Link Neighborhood.
2. The amount of traffic the page that links to you receives.
3. The location of the link on the page that links to you.
4. The number of links on the page that links to you
5. The accessibility of the page that links to you to the search engines.
6. The link neighborhood of the page that links to you.

To learn more about quality links see our tutorial Evaluating the Quality of
a Link.

Get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links.

It’s very important that you get your keywords into the text of the link (anchor text) that other sites are using to point visitors your way. True, this may be difficult with directories unless the name of your company includes your keywords. Regardless, the boost in keyword relevancy is significant enough that it’s worthwhile to contact everyone who is linking to you with a specific request regarding the text being used in your link. If you happen to be selling model airplanes, then anchor text such as airplane models or model airplanes will be infinitely more valuable to your relevance efforts than anchor text simply saying click here. From a Search Engine Point of View (SEPOV) the former states the theme of your page while the later gives the engine no clue whatsoever what your page is about.

A word of caution: it will look more natural from a SEPOV if the text links that are pointing at your site are not identical.  Strive to maintain slight variations as would occur if the anchor text were being generated independently by the sites that are maintaining them.  Of course, the nature of your business and the name of your company might dictate the range of options available to you.  However, do everything in your power to insure that the text being used to point visitors and engines to your site looks natural from a SEPOV.

NOTE: This strategy can make a HUGE difference.
 

Go for deep links

Make sure that some of your links are deep links — i.e., links to sub-pages within your site which are not your homepage.
 

Make sure that the URL format of your referring links are consistently identical.

Question: Are you aware that…

• http://your-site.com
• http://your-site.com/
• http://your-site.com/index.html
• http://www.your-site.com
• http://www.your-site.com/
• http://www.your-site.com/index.html

…are all technically SIX different URLs even though each will land the site visitor on the same webpage? That’s right. And, if those who link to you use six different URL formats to point visitors to your “home” page then your PageRank is being diluted by a factor of six - not good! You simply must do everything in your power to standardize your incoming URL-format in order to consolidate your PageRank. Doing so will produce the maximum relevancy-boost possible from your incoming links.
 

Avoid linking to low quality web sites.

Gaining links from off-topic and perhaps not-trusted sites may not be your first choice, but, reportedly, it won’t exactly hurt your rankings - they might even help a little. However, beware of getting yourself into a link exchange relationship with these sites and remember that you should not link back to them.  Currently, the rule is that incoming links won’t hurt you but outgoing links to sites that behave badly, can. In other words, if you’re left with only the option to swap links, be sure you do so carefully because linking to a site that has been penalized for policy infractions (i.e. search engine spam) can cause your site to be penalized as well.  To help you
avoid such a scenario, here are four cautionary steps you should take before linking to another site:

1. Search for their domain name on Google and Yahoo.
   If they’re not listed on one or either of the engines, that’s a bad sign.  Linking to them could get your site penalized and possibly banned.  Besides, even if they aren’t a so-called "bad" site, linking to a site that the engines don’t know about won’t help you in the rankings anyway.  If they are listed you can proceed to step two.
2. Determine who is already linking to them.
   The more incoming links they have, the better.  Furthermore, the more important the sites that are linking to them, the better.  Their PageRank score is one indicator of how important Google thinks the site is.
3. Beware of linking to sites or pages with a PR=0 (zero).
   This could mean that they’ve been penalized by Google.  Granted, this test may not apply to very new sites, but if a site has been around for a while and lacks any PageRank, then you should be wary of linking to it.
4. Avoid linking to sites with controversial topics.
   Good examples of such sites would include gambling, adult, pharmacy, or loan/debt sites.

REMEMBER: You probably won’t be hurt by who links to you. However, you can definitely be hurt by who you link to.
 

Remember that profits are your goal.

Most likely you are optimizing your site with profits in mind.  That being the case, you’ll want to always focus your efforts on strategies and relationships that will generate the most revenue relative to effort. Therefore, look first for link relationships that will produce traffic that fits the profile of your customer market.  While it’s true that incoming links from just about any site provides a slight boost to your page popularity (leading to better search engine ranking), such links all-too-often fail to produce targeted traffic which is what you really should be looking for.  This is one of the many reasons a link from a topic-related site is immeasurably better than a link from an off-topic site.
 

Patience

Building a natural incoming link structure takes time.  That’s precisely why the engines tend to highly rank the sites that conform to this pattern.  If you want to succeed online then you need to follow the lead of the search engines.  That means taking the but steady link building approach remains the cornerstone for succeeding long term.

Next tutorial: Advanced strategies for building inbound links
Previous tutorial: Evaluating the quality of a link

• Return to the search engine optimization tutorial page
• Return to the main tutorials page

This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.