Obtaining quality inbound links is critical if you want to organically rank well in the search engines. High search engine rankings are obtained with both on-site and off-site content. Properly optimizing your website for the search engines is really the start of your online project. While great content alone may get you decent rankings in a noncompetitive market as you move into more competitive areas inbound links will make or break your internet marketing campaign.

Simply put, without quality inbound links your website will not gain sufficient placement in the search engines.

If content is king, then linking is queen. While content is important, link popularity is the deciding factor on what will or will not rank well.

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The primary things considered when evaluating link popularity is:
-The number of incoming links to a page / site.
-The quality of the incoming links (links from NASA will be more powerful than links from a random star gazer website).
-The anchor text (link text) of the incoming links. Should include the keywords you are targeting; 'click here' vs 'city keyword'.

Quality links from related websites not only increase your direct traffic via click-through, but also increases your link popularity. Link popularity is used by the big search engines as a gauge of the importance of your website. The more quality inbound links you have the more link popularity you have. The more link popularity you have the higher your pages will be listed in search engines.

Here are some things to keep in mind when building a link campaign:

1.) Links should be as natural as possible. In order to make your links seem as natural as possible, your anchor text and landing pages should vary. You should have some links to you listed as ‘sitename.com’ as well as ‘click here’, while the majority should be keyword rich anchor text. Example: ‘Buy Cheap Computers Online’.

2.) Links should be ‘deep’ into your site. The best rule of thumb is that 70% of you links go to your home page, 30% should be landing internally onto your website.

3.) The links should be from a related field as your website. For example if you are selling computers, then good links would be: computer accessories, computer support, software, hardware, computer training, etc…. Getting links from unrelated industries do some good, but relevant is better.

4.) You should seek links from pages that have less than 20 outbound links and have some page rank (1 is better than 0). The page's url should not be have any of the following words: ‘links, resources, partners, directory or reciprocal’. Pages with these words are often little benefit by the search engines.

5.) One way links are best, reciprocate if you have to. The best links are one way links to your website, but there are a huge number of people practicing reciprocal linking. We recommend swapping links as long as your reciprocal partners are relevant quality sites.

6.) When setting up your link pages (if you choose to reciprocate links) keep the number of outbound links to 10 or 15 tops. Make sure you are linking to quality pages (linking to pages with zero or one page rank may hurt your websites rankings). Don’t name your link pages ‘links, resources, partners, directory or reciprocal’. By doing this your site will be desirable to people looking to swap links.

If your website has quality content and you link to quality content, people will be more inclined to link to you (or to swap links with you).

We offer ongoing Search Engine Optimization services that include maintenance of your link building campaign. Contact us to learn more.