Tuesday, March 29, 2005
12 Essential Strategies for Building & Structuring Inbound Links
Guest Article By Stephen Mahaney www.marketposition.com
One of the trickiest aspects of search engine optimization is the process of building high quality incoming links. And, as you've undoubtedly heard, it's also the single most important thing you can do to improve your rankings. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is - and search engines like popular pages.
The challenge for most sites is to accumulate enough incoming links to appear relevant to the engines without tripping any one of the many spam filters and penalties that are applied to sites that cheat.
Summary: (Full article at Here)
1. Focus on creating a natural incoming link structure that builds steadily but gradually over time.
2. Focus on getting links from authoritative sites with high PageRank. If they also happen to be on-topic, then all the better.
3. It's ok to get links from less important sites but remember: the lower the PageRank of a referring page, the more you'll want it to match your topic.
4. Strive to get your inbound links placed on pages with few outbound links...the fewer the better.
5. See to it that the URL format of your referring links are consistently identical.
6. Get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links as much as possible. However, avoid having all identical incoming link anchor text. Strive for some variety.
7. When starting out, focus on the major directories as a source of important links then shift to the topic-specific directories to solidify the theme relevance of your site.
8. Work your trade directories, press releases, suppliers, customers, and testimonials as an outside the box approach to building a gradual, solid, lasting, and natural incoming link structure. Think creatively.
9. Don't waste a lot of time getting reciprocal links. Their value is diminishing in the current SE environment. We see a time coming when the value of reciprocal links between non-authoritative sites will be discounted or entirely canceled out.
10. Avoid reciprocal links with pages that are designed solely for exchanging links.
11. Avoid linking back to sites that are unlisted by Google or Yahoo. Seriously avoid linking to link farms, web rings or any site that exhibits behavior contrary to a search engine's recommended protocol. Avoid linking to controversial sites unless they perfectly match the topic of your page.
12. Always remember that profits are your goal. More links does not always add more customers. Avoid wasting energy on projects that may increase link counts but add little or nothing to gain customers that generate profits.
Other Resources:
NetIQ produces several products, including WebPosition, the first software program to report your search positions on the major search engines and to help you improve those positions.
Download a FREE trial of WebPosition Gold 3
One of the trickiest aspects of search engine optimization is the process of building high quality incoming links. And, as you've undoubtedly heard, it's also the single most important thing you can do to improve your rankings. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is - and search engines like popular pages.
The challenge for most sites is to accumulate enough incoming links to appear relevant to the engines without tripping any one of the many spam filters and penalties that are applied to sites that cheat.
Summary: (Full article at Here)
1. Focus on creating a natural incoming link structure that builds steadily but gradually over time.
2. Focus on getting links from authoritative sites with high PageRank. If they also happen to be on-topic, then all the better.
3. It's ok to get links from less important sites but remember: the lower the PageRank of a referring page, the more you'll want it to match your topic.
4. Strive to get your inbound links placed on pages with few outbound links...the fewer the better.
5. See to it that the URL format of your referring links are consistently identical.
6. Get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links as much as possible. However, avoid having all identical incoming link anchor text. Strive for some variety.
7. When starting out, focus on the major directories as a source of important links then shift to the topic-specific directories to solidify the theme relevance of your site.
8. Work your trade directories, press releases, suppliers, customers, and testimonials as an outside the box approach to building a gradual, solid, lasting, and natural incoming link structure. Think creatively.
9. Don't waste a lot of time getting reciprocal links. Their value is diminishing in the current SE environment. We see a time coming when the value of reciprocal links between non-authoritative sites will be discounted or entirely canceled out.
10. Avoid reciprocal links with pages that are designed solely for exchanging links.
11. Avoid linking back to sites that are unlisted by Google or Yahoo. Seriously avoid linking to link farms, web rings or any site that exhibits behavior contrary to a search engine's recommended protocol. Avoid linking to controversial sites unless they perfectly match the topic of your page.
12. Always remember that profits are your goal. More links does not always add more customers. Avoid wasting energy on projects that may increase link counts but add little or nothing to gain customers that generate profits.
Other Resources:
NetIQ produces several products, including WebPosition, the first software program to report your search positions on the major search engines and to help you improve those positions.
Download a FREE trial of WebPosition Gold 3
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