Link Building Tips

Find Relevant Links

The first thing you must do when you begin your quest to build links to your website is find relevant websites that will link to you.

How I classify a relevant link is this: the page where your link will appear either mentions your keyword or a synonym to that keyword.

As of right now, it does not appear that Google, Yahoo and MSN are using relevancy in their ranking algorithms but, trust me, they soon will.

So why not start preparing for the coming changes now? Then when the changes are made, you will be ahead of everyone else – and your rankings will show it!

Here are some more reasons to start building relevant links now:
1. You may actually receive traffic from those links if they are related to the theme of the site they are on.
2. In the future, these links will be viewed by the search engines as more valuable and will make your web pages appear more relevant for your target search terms.

Anchor Text Variety

Non Natural Anchor Text

The anchor text is the readable portion of the text that is usually underlined and in blue. Here is the html:
Job Search

The portion that says “Golf Clubs” is the anchor text. This is important because this anchor text is how the search engines determine relevance for search terms. So if I want to rank for “Golf Clubs,” I would need to obtain some links with this in the anchor text.

Now this is where some people get carried away and shoot themselves in the foot.
You see, many people go out and get 1,000 links all with the exact same anchor text. The problem is that this would not occur naturally. If you were to analyze the backlinks for some of your competitors, I am sure you would find that their backlink anchor text is not 100% pure.

They might have “click here” or “http://jobsadvisor.instantspot.com/blog”, etc. It looks very suspicious to the search engines if your anchor text is all exactly the same.

Natural Anchor Text Linking

In order to appear natural you need to ensure you build links using a variety of anchor text. Don’t be afraid to junk up your anchor text a bit. You may find it actually helps you in your rankings ☺
I would recommend you use your top target keywords as anchor text using some variations with other keyword phrases. Also, throw in some “click here” and some “www.mydomain.com” … this will ensure your links look natural.

In fact, you should come up with a list of anchor text variations that you can rotate through for each of your site’s pages. This will ensure your link portfolio looks as natural as possible to the search engines.

Deep Linking

Non Natural Inbound Linking (100% of the links go to the home page)
This is an important tip and could be the difference between success and failure of your newly launched site(s).

Deep links are links to internal pages of your website. Most people will aggressively build links only to their homepage … but this is definitely not the most natural looking linking profile.
Instead, I would recommend you split you inbound links between your home page and your internal pages.
You should still have about 50% or so of the links point to the homepage, but spread the other links out across your other pages.

Natural Inbound Linking

This has a couple of benefits.
• This will result in your site getting deeply spidered which in turn will cause the search engines to find and index more pages faster.
• You will also start to notice that your internal pages will begin to rank better for their target keywords.
• I believe if you do this on newly launched sites you can keep yourself out of the “Google sandbox.”

Unique IP Addresses

Non Natural Linking from single IP address

Every website is assigned to an IP address. An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number for a computer or other network device on the Internet.

Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific server or a website.
Here is an example IP Address:

123.456.789.000
A Block: 123
B Block: 456
C Block: 789
D Block: 000

Natural Linking from various IP Addresses
When building your links you want to ensure you get links from a variety of IP sources, this will ensure you have the most natural looking backlink portfolio.

This may sound like a simple tip, but getting site wide links from a high PR website is not a good idea for this reason. You may get 1,000’s of links, but they are all from the same IP and will in short order hurt your rankings instead of improve them. This of course is mostly in Google, MSN may still give you some love.

Link Building Velocity

One of the things that I learned from reading the Google Patent is that Google pays attention to the speed at which you aquire your links.

This is why it is highly recommended that you build your links slowly and at a consistent velocity, or speed. The reason to do this is because a site that is naturally popular will consistently gain new links just from people wanting to share what they have found.

In order to duplicate this, we must resist what can be a very strong urge to acquire as many links as we can as fast as we can.

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