Building & Structuring Inbound Links Part 1

12 Essential Strategies

By Stephen Mahaney

Originally Published: December 2004

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. So, the secret to getting it right is to...

 take the search engine's point of view
when building your incoming link structure. 

The key point to remember is that search engines like natural link structure - they hate artificial link structure.

Natural vs. Artificial Links

Natural links vary in anchor text while artificial links tend to be identical. Natural links increase gradually as referral sites add links one by one over time; artificial links can sprout in great numbers all of a sudden.

Sites designed around natural links don't usually swap links, so their outgoing links tend to point to pages that are known by the engine to be in good standing. Oftentimes these pages have been indexed for many years and may even be white listed - a term that identifies trusted sites not to be penalized. Sites designed around artificial links will often participate in link swapping and have outgoing links that point to pages that resemble link farms, web rings, or isolated nodes (i.e. page groups linking to each other but lacking inbound links from outside trusted sites).

Natural links tend not to be reciprocal. Artificial links, however, rely heavily on link exchange tactics, suggesting that the sole purpose of the link is reciprocity - having little or nothing to do with adding value for the site visitor by way of providing worthwhile content.

Keeping these facts in mind, one should strive to build the most natural-looking incoming-link structure possible. From a search engine's point of view (SEPOV), the best kind of links are unrequested links. The engines are looking to bestow high rankings on only those pages that people voluntarily link to due to great content - not because some webmaster has spent a lot of time swapping links. Read on for tips and tricks on how to build the best incoming-link structure and boost your PageRank dramatically.

Choose Your Links Wisely

While it's true that almost any link from anyone will add something of value to your page popularity, it's best to get links from authoritative pages. Such pages are considered important and are usually identified as such by Google within their PageRank scoring system. The higher the PageRank, the better the link. Directory examples would include sites like Yahoo and DMOZ. Others like PBS.org, National Geographic, CNN, or ZDnet would be exceptional authoritative site links regardless of topic since each has been assigned a PageRank of 9 or better on Google's ten-point scale.

Your next best option is to acquire links from pages that are trusted. Trusted pages are sites that have been indexed for a while and have already been assigned a Google PageRank - usually PR=5 or better. It helps even more if these pages are on-topic - i.e. they match the topic of your page. Links from on-topic trusted pages can give you a significant boost in rankings.

Continued: 12 Essential Strategies for Building & Structuring Inbound Links Part 2 >>>

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software.

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July 04 2009 11:54 UTC