How to achieve High Quality Link Building

Link building or PR (public relations/page rank) building has always been the hardest but most important part in the web site promotions cycle and SEO Optimizations. Inbound links (the ones that point to your website from others) are one of the criteria’s on which search engine judge the quality of your website and this immediately results in how your page ranks for your targeted keywords in search results.

The first thing to know is to be able to understand the value of inbound links and why special types of links rank differently and some can have positive effect others not so positive.

The first and most important factor for judging the quality of a link is called relevancy. In order to qualify one link as relevant, the link itself must be located on page with the same topic/theme as your website and also the text that your link is carrying must be repeated at least few more times in the content of that page. When search engines get such links they assume that your website is highly valuable resource and give it high rating.

The second most important factor for quality of inbound link is the location and page rating of that page. The best place to have a link on is the Index or better known homepage because usually that page has the highest page rank from all and having link on that page will bring you small portion of that page rank to your own website. It is assumed that on high quality relevant page with high pr that it can transfer up to 85% of the linking page rank which means that if you have one link on pr 6 website you will most definitely get pr4 which is quite good.

The third important factor is the location of the link on the page. It is preferable that the link is located in the upper/main content part of the website or near the main navigation menu. This links are assumed to be with higher priority than other located in the footer/bottom of the web site as most of the footer links are from mutual linking and are not natural.

The forth important factor is the number of links located on the same page. Links in pages with more than 10 outbound (pointing out) links have lower quality than ones that have only a few. Having large amounts of outgoing links means that this page is not high quality resource and is part of a link campaign – unnatural linking. Search Engines favor links that are assumed to be posted by users who liked your website or the services that you offer and place the link as helpful resource (also known as natural linking) not as part of a link building campaign (the unnatural linking that I’ve mentioned above) like what we have in reality. Recent search engine algorithm upgrade show that links on pages with more than 20 outgoing links are assumed to be link spam and they carry almost no page rank and are not counted as backlinks. I use the formula that the higher the page rank of the linking page is, the greater the amount of links that you can place on, but in the same time if the page is new/ or with low page rank then the outgoing links will carry small to none weight.

Ok. We’ve covered the main quality guidelines for link building but now we have to mention something extremely important – the linking text. This is the text that you put in the link itself. This text should be keyword or keyword phrase that you are targeting on the search engines and you want to rank high for it. For example if you are selling shoes, you would like to pace as keyword for example “Adidas biform wrestling shoes” not only “shoes” or “Adam’s shoe store” because you won’t need to rank for the name of your store as much as you need to rank for the type of shoes, brand and model. You have to choose the keyword extremely wisely because if that keyword is very popular (there are a lot of websites going for it) the chances that you are going to rank on the top 10 are lower and if you narrow down the key-phrase you can actually get some good position that can make a lot of sales! This is the same with all products and services. ( I will write separate topic on how to choose your keywords properly to get some nice outcome of the whole link building campaign)

There are many forms of link building strategies and some are good some not that good. There is no perfect version where you get only high quality links and you will go to the top in 1,2,3. There should be step-by-step link building. The best way that I’ve proven for myself to be successful is to start with directory links – they are not very high quality but you can get listed in them quite easily compared to other places. When you submit your website in somewhere about 500 web directories you will be able to lay down the foundation of good website standing which later on will be enchased by some content linking and article links.

The main type of link building is thru Web Directory Listings. Web Directories are websites with categorized by type lists of website where you can use like the “yellow pages” to find out the right one for what you are looking for. Those Directories list your website in between similar websites which makes this type of inbound links with high quality because they are located in “highly relevant content” but due to the large amount of links on each page they pass only a fraction of the page rank that they have.

The second way is thru link exchange with fellow webmasters. There are two major types of link swapping – the first one is two way linking – i.e. the rule is that you place link to their website on yours and they do the same on theirs. This is also called Link Swapping. The second way is so called 3 way link swapping where you place a link on your website to one website and other website places link to you, so there is no one-to-one link exchange. Some search engines are capable of tracing two way link exchanges and they penalize that will lowering the page rank rate that they pass. This doesn’t mean that they don’t pass page rank or that they are dangerous to your website, but still are not the optimum way to make link exchange. The best version is more complex and involves people with more than one website where you can implement 3 way linking strategy which is “for now” undetectable by current search engine algorithms and passes very nice page rank.

The third way is by buying one way links. There are a lot of websites that sell text link ads per monthly rate which can help you out in the Search Engine promotions. Most of the time link buying is quite cheaper than paying for pay-per-click advertising. I strongly advice most of my clients to go for text link ads and save their money because nowadays you can go in bankruptcy if you rely on per-per-click.

The forth and most successful but hardest way to get quality links is thru article/content writing for other web sites. In this case you write articles/content for other websites on your topic and put links to your own website (no more than 3 links – article exchange policy). This is the highest page rank building strategy but is very slow and labor intensive but good things cost money. A good article usually produces about 10-15 high quality permanent links which is really good to have. If you are able to produce about 100-200 of those you can have your website ranked pretty well for the major search engines.

There are many other forms of link building but most of them are not with really good results and are not worth the time and money invested to bother doing them. The best quality link building strategy is the combination of all forms listed above. If you start with them for few months your site will be able to get higher pr and search engine rating will increase. The only thing that is needed now is you to make the effort and help your website rank higher and you will be repaid many times more when sales start flowing in!