One of the basic things that we try to accomplish in website marketing is to get better natural search engine rankings. In order to make that happen, there are several key things that you’ll have to do. In this article we’ll focus on the part of SEO that deals with link building.

When building links its important that you do it in the right way. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation and bad practices out there when it comes to link building. So let’s try and clear a few things up for you so that you can be sure to build your links in the most effective way. Effective Use of PageRank

As a reminder for those of you who don’t already know, PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of a page. So essentially it’s a quality scale. Here’s the basics of how it works: if you can get a link on a page with a higher PageRank, that link will be more beneficial for you than a link on a page with a lower PageRank. So ideally, when we’re out there looking for places to build links, we want to focus on those sites that have a decent PageRank. Start with a 3 and above. Higher is better of course, but don’t be afraid to get links from lower PageRank sites.

One of the problems with just measuring your links according to PageRank is that it isn’t really up to date. On the back end, PageRank is changing all of the time. When Google does a “PageRank Update”, it simply means that they’ve decided to update the information that they publish to the public. So don’t swear by PageRank 100%. Instead, use it as a general guideline.

Place Links on Related Sites

One of the big misconceptions out there about building links is that it only matters how many you get. Just build tons and tons of links with any sites that you can and it will help. I wouldn’t recommend following this policy! Whenever you are doing link building, you want to keep you links coming from websites with a related topic as much as possible. In other words, it needs to make sense for your link to be on that page. For example, if you have a website that sells dog products, why would you want your link to show up on a site about how to lose weight? That doesn’t make a lot of sense does it? We want to link with related websites.

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Vary Your Anchor Text

When we talk about anchor text, we’re talking about the words that you can click on in a hyperlink. When building links we want the anchors for our links to be our main keyword phrases. But we also don’t want to use the exact same keyword phrase all of the time. By adding variety to our anchor text we avoid the problem of being penalized for overusing the phrase we’re trying to get rankings for. So it’s actually a good idea from time to time to have the anchor for your links to be either your site name or even a general phrase like ‘click here’. You should also have several main phrases that you’re trying to get traffic for. This alone with give you some good variety to your anchor text.

Various Types of Links

We should also have links from different types of sites as well (as long as the content is related). That’s why we do different link building methods like reciprocals, directories, articles, press releases, blogs, etc. All of these add up to be your site’s overall link profile. We want to add variety to the sites in our link profile if we’re going to use an effective link-building strategy.

These are just a few main pointers to consider when developing your overall link building strategy. Let me give you an example of a very poorly constructed link building strategy (and it’s one that’s pretty common out there unfortunately): sign up with a link marketplace that does reciprocal links with any site out there and just get as many links as you possibly can with anybody. You’ll notice on some websites that when you go to their links or resources page they have hundreds of links with all different sites. This is not the best way to do it!

Think about this: the internet is based on information. Search engines are trying to sort through that information to give the end user the most relevant results. So wouldn’t it make sense to mostly associate our site with other sites in the same topic or genre, thus improving the overall relevancy of the search results? Stick with related sites, vary your anchor text, and get different types of links. These are 3 of the backbones of an effective link building strategy.