7 Tips to Successful Link Building

Building incoming links is the best way to improve your search engine rankings. Do it improperly and you could drop out of the rankings. Below are seven tips to successful link building and a natural looking link pattern.

1. Build links from sites that are similar in theme to yours. A link from a site that has similar content to yours is way more valuable and natural lookingthan a link from a site that has nothing in common with your web site. Relevancy is more important than Page Rank.

2. Vary the anchor text. Search engines associate your web site with the anchor text from incoming links. A link coming into your site with the anchor text “widgets” should improve your relevancy for “widgets.” It won’t look natural to the search engines if the majority of your inbound links have the same anchor text. It’s a good idea to have a list of multiple keywords that you build incoming links with.

3. Build text links, not image links. When you have a choice between a text link and an image link, choose the text link because they influence the search engines better than image links do. Make sure to put your keywords in the Alt tags of images that link to your site.

4. Go Deep. It’s only natural that a site should have links coming into the homepage and important sub pages. Deep link your sub pages that target competitive keywords.

5. Do not build site-wide links from unrelated sites. It is natural to have site wide links from sites similar to yours: Many blogs have a blog roll with site-wide links to similar sites. Site-wide links from unrelated sites can raise a huge red flag, especially if you have a lot of them all with the same anchor text.

6. Build links from sites with different levels of authority. Natural link development includes inbound links from sites with a variety of Page Ranks. Most sites have more inbound links from PR3’s and 4’s than they will 7’s and 8’s.

7. Submit to directories. Submit your website to most of the top directories like Yahoo!, DMOZ, Business.com, Best of the Web… It is only natural for a site with many inbound links to have links coming in from directories.

When building links it is important to think like the search engines. Do this and your link building should be a success.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, link building

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Nice list. But don’t forget, natural links aren’t “built” at all, but show up unexpectedly.