Link Building Tips Part 1

The following link building tips will serve you well after your site has 30+ pages of valuable information (articles of interest to your visitors) on your site. Link building is a very important part of your search engine optimization strategy. Here I recommend only the most productive and efficient techniques so that you can keep doing what you need to do most - build your website or web business.

Note: New to Search Engine Optimization? See The Basics of Search Engine Optimization.

A significant part of search engine optimization has to do with links. Inbound links are very important to a new and developing site.

Inbound Links

Those links that are not on your site but will take a visitor to your site when you click on them.

Inbound Links

There are three reasons why you want to have inbound links.

• Some search engines don't accept page submissions. The only way these search engines can find your site is through inbound links.
• Search engines, especially Google, place significant importance on inbound links. The theory is that if someone is linking to a page on your site it's like there saying they like that page's content. Search engines consider an inbound link to be a good "vote" for your page (or site).
• Inbound links will bring (some) traffic to your site.

One of the most important things to understand about search engine optimization is that the more high quality inbound links the better.

High Quality Inbound Links

A search engine will rank a page higher if it 'sees' other pages, on the same topic, linking to that page.

If a website links to your page with a high quality link it makes your page seem even more valuable. What makes a high quality inbound link?

• It's from a site on a related topic.
• It's from a page that is close to the same topic as your page. The closer the better.
• It's from a page that has other high quality inbound links linking to it.
• It's a text link (as opposed to an image) and that text includes the keyword or topic that your page is about.

Example

Suppose you have a web page about Italian food. In this case a very high quality inbound link:

• Would be from a site about Italian food.
• Would be from a page about Italian food.
• The page that the inbound link was on would itself have inbound links coming from other pages about Italian food.
• The text of the inbound link would say something like "Click here for good Italian food!"

As you can see it has to do with being on the same topic. Even being close to the same topic can be good. But, suppose 20 sites about "football" linked to your Italian Foods page. Would Google think these "football" links proved that your Italian food site has value? Probably not. Those 20 links aren't worth very much as far as search engines go because they are not on the same topic or nearly the same topic as Italian food.

One of the most important link building tips is: Try to get inbound links pointing to your site that have content on the same or a similar subject - the closer the better.

How do you get good inbound links? See Link Building Tips Part 2.