A Suggested Approach to Link Building

Obtaining a portfolio of good quality links can be a time-consuming task. There are
proprietary software packages to help you in your task of tracking down web sites with relevant content. Many organisations work on a reciprocal basis. Sites with high Page
Rank may even charge for links. There are also link marketing and exchanging
specialists. However, according to Google, any attempt to exchange or buy links with the
explicit attempt to influence the ranking of your web site is considered link spamming.
My suggestion is to start close to home, exchanging links with businesses you may have a
trading relationship with. Do not rush into the link building process and do not trade links
with just anyone. Poor quality links may have a negative impact on your site.

Originating Site has been Crawled and Indexed

It may sound obvious, but for search engine purposes a link is not a link if the search
engines are not aware of it. The link will only exist in the records of the search engine if
the page on which it is situated has been crawled and indexed whilst the link was there.

Link Age

A long established link is deemed by Google to have more value than a recent link. A
rapid build up in links may also be deemed spam. However Google apparently makes an
allowance for a rapid build-up of links generated by news stories.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that contains or sits alongside a link. This text provides additional
relevance to the quality of a link. Anchor text is written in HTML. On-screen part of the
text shows up as highlighted (usually coloured) or underlined type and part in normal
type. The anchor text for your site could be written in HTML code as follows:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com"> Your Site Title </a> - A short description of what
you do. <BR>

Link Density

Links from pages with fewer outbound links have more influence than from pages where
there are huge numbers of links – see FFAs. Additional outbound links dilute the value of
existing links on a page. My suggestion is to accept links from pages with no more than
10 to 12 links. Avoid pages with 20+ external links.

Site and Page Relevance

A link from a site and page carrying similar content would carry more influence than
from a site without the similar content.

Google Page Rank

For Google ranking purposes a link from a high Page Rank site has even greater
influence. A link from a PR 6+ site is extremely valuable. At the other extreme, I suggest
you are prudent when exchanging links with sites of a PR of zero. The PR0 category
contains a number of banned sites.

Key Factors Effecting Link Quality

According to SEO convention and the information gleaned from the Google patents, there
are a number of factors affecting the quality of your inbound links.

SEO 3 – The Off-Site Phase

The off-site phase deals primarily with inbound link building. Amongst the major engines
Google places the greatest emphasis on links. The relevance and quality of these links has a significant influence on the ranking of your site in all of the major engines. The search
engine algorithm interprets each inbound link as a “vote” for a site. Not all links are equal
and therefore the quality of the vote is important in determining the value of the vote.

CSS Format

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is a way of compressing HTML code, allowing
a site to load faster and, in the SEO context, improves the density and priority of
keywords.