Fundamentals of Building Links Links MUST reflect value. There’s no “best practices,” and no “right way” when building links, there’s only creativity, intelligence, and hard work.
Links are primarily about sharing, and getting traffic, but they have also become a commodity due to Google's Page Rank.
Now, when one discusses linking it is all about Google. We forget that links should done to build traffic and Google's evaluation of them (PR) secondary. Your links have 2 discreet and different audiences, visitors and search engines.
You want the credibility good links can provide for your visitors, and you want the rankings good links provide for the search engines.
Develop your linking (and marketing) strategy with people in mind, not search engines.
However, you should not be blind to the search optimization factors involved. Learn to distinguish between low-quality links and high-quality links using relevance as a measuring tool.
Highly relevant links are what we aspire to.
Linking from content on another site that is relevant to the content on your site is the primary objective.
Eight Primary Components of Building Quality Links - Difficulty: in general, valuable links are difficult to obtain.
Time is an associated cost in link building. (I am not talking about paid links)
The time to research the high PR sites, get in front of the webmaster, and get your link added in the most beneficial manner.
The time to write the content that accompanies the link.
The most valuable links come from sources where your competitors are unlikely to get linked or where others would often search. - Investment: valuable links require an investment.
This goes hand-in-hand with the Difficulty factor.
There is an associated cost involved, be it in the development of a targeted piece of content, in the purchase of the link, in the writing of the site being linked to, or simply in the time required to influence the influencers. - Credibility: a quality link comes from a credible source.
Credible link sources elevate the perceived credibility of the site they’re linking to because they are clicked on at trusted sources. - Authority: working alongside the credibility quotient is authority.
High quality links come from authoritative sources, (High Page Rank).
These can be in your niche or in the wide environment of media attention. - Relevance: valuable links are relevant to your market, industry or community.
Valuable link sources are within your neighborhood locally and on the web.
Get sites to provide you with accurate co-citation to improve SEO. - Context: valuable links are contextual and come from sources with keyword-focused pages.
In most competitive markets, pages that rank well are semantically well optimized.
You want your link surrounded by that keyword-themed content. - Humanity: valuable links require a human element to obtain.
We all like direct link sources, but quite often the most high-value back-links come from sources that have a human being in control. These links are developed by interacting with the site's decision maker. Building a relationship is a prelude to getting listed.
Most highly valued links are decided by a human being in charge. - Structure: The construction of the link is important.
Anchor text is important. Often, for expediency, a link will be written as "Click Here"
Sometimes it will be a "raw" link to the page as in www.the_site.com/some_page.htm. This is when it is important to have a domain name incorporating keywords and using descriptive file naming protocols. www.the-widget-site.com/blue-widgets.html The best is to use anchor text. "Announcing the release of the Widget Site's new Blue Widgets." incorporates a message with all the keywords. Deep linking this to the page that has the most copy about Blue Widgets instead of the main-page is recommended. Link Neighborhoods Are Important. So is the speed at which you make these links.
Google knows that quality is more important than quantity.
They want links to appear organically, without the taint of SEO manipulation.
They also know than there are automated programs that will get you hundreds if not thousands of links with the click of a button.
It has been stated that Google raises a large red flag if they see *many*, (and none but Google knows the amount), of links appearing simultaneously. Cross Linking. This applies to sites owned by the same person/organization.
If the sites linked to are relevant to the site the link is placed on, there is not problems. If the site linked to is not relevant, use a "nofollow" tag. Using a nofollow Attribute. If the link is there to make you money or is to a non-relative page, use a nofollow in the link to tell the SE that no "link juice" is to be transferred. Google does not want to transfer Page Rank for commercial purposes nor does it want to assign PR to linked pages done for the sake of linking. (E.G.: Reciprocal linking: "I link to you, you link to me" schemes.)
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