Building & Structuring Inbound Links Part 6

12 Essential Strategies

By Stephen Mahaney

Originally Published: December 2004

Continued From: <<< 12 Essential Strategies for Building & Structuring Inbound Links Part 5

Train Your Eye On The Primary Goal - Profits!

Of course, our biggest assumption is that you're optimizing your site with profits in mind. That being the case, you'll want to always focus your efforts on strategies and relationships that will generate the most revenue relative to effort. Therefore, look first for link relationships that will produce traffic that fits the profile of your customer market.

While it's true that incoming links from just about any site provides a slight boost to your page popularity (leading to better search engine ranking), such links all-too-often fail to produce targeted traffic which is what you really should be looking for. This is one of the many reasons a link from a topic-related site is immeasurably better than a link from an off-topic site.

Summary

We've covered a lot of ground so let's review where we've been:

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.

There you have the top 12 essential strategies for building and structuring your inbound links. Of course, building such a natural incoming link structure takes time. That's precisely why the engines tend to highly rank the sites that conform to this pattern. Over time, experience has taught us that overnight success strategies are fickle while the solid content and slow but steady link building approach remains the cornerstone for succeeding long term.

Follow these guidelines and sooner or later you'll be looking like a top ranking SEO genius.

Reprinted by permission from: http://www.searchenginehelp.com/

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Continued From: <<< 12 Essential Strategies for Building & Structuring Inbound Links Part 5

Part 1: <<< 12 Essential Strategies for Building & Structuring Inbound Links Part 1

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition.
FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings.

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August 29 2008 23:59 UTC