SEO Linkbuilding and Backlinks

When you think of building your online empire, the slow and tedious process of building backlinks is probably the last thing that comes to mind. It is however one of the highest leverage SEO activities you can have in your online business simply because it will end up bringing you more traffic and making you more money.

Back links will increase your link popularity which will increase Google Page Rank on your site. A higher Page Rank translates to a higher ranking in the search engines. Although PR is no longer the all and everything of search engine optimization, it is still a good way to gauge just how popular your site is.

About 90% of Page Rank is determined by back links. Today, you simply cannot increase Google Page Rank without getting more backlinks. Most website owners and marketers make the terrible mistake of blindly diving into link building with only a hope that it will improve their search engine ranking.

Be warned: Not all links are good. The wrong links can be worthless and even damage your link profile.

1. Page Rank
Focus on getting links from high Page Rank sites. They carry more value than a link from a low page rank site. The PR value gets passed on to an outbound link from the top level URL which means that the home page PR carries a lot of link value. This is why links from high PR sites are so sought after for SEO purposes. The only thing that's better than a link from a high PR site, is a link from a high PR page.

2. Nofollow and Dofollow links
A lot of sites nowadays have what is called the "nofollow" tag. It was originally introduced to keep spammers spammers from posting random links everywhere. Google's bot will read the nofollow link, but won't credit it as a backlink. So, from an SEO point of view these links are worthless.

3. Be Relevant
It's important to remember that back links always have to look natural. The natural thing would be for links to be relevant and for sites with related content to link to each other. Google is getting smarter at sniffing out bogus links. Focus on getting backlinks from sites that are relevant and similar to yours. These links will have more linkjuice and you will will get a higher value than random links from unrelated sites.

4. Anchor text
Following on from being relevant is the issue of anchor text. Anchor text the text that contains the actual link and Google assigns a lot more value to a link with anchor text simply because it's undeniable that it's relevant of the anchor text is relevant. You should always try and use your keywords as anchor text.

5. Permanent Backlinks
There are a lot of linkbuilding networks and services out there. It's big business and website owners are willing to pay good money fro good back links. One of the biggest problems with buying links is that they are not permanent. If you buy links from a network, it is mostly a link that you rent. When you cancel your membership, you will probably lose all your backlinks and pretty soon you will also lose your ranking in the search engines.