This article was originally written Sep 15, 2005 - Due to the age of this article, some of the information or techniques may no longer be relevant. To learn the most up to date techniques for link building check out our updated Link Building article from July 28, 2008.

Inbound Link Creation Tips?

The necessity of a strong Link Building program is critical to the success of your web site on the Internet today.

The necessity of a strong Link Building program is critical to the success of your web site on the Internet today. To help determine your sites relevancy to the search term entered by someone at a search engine, most of the top search engines take into account the number of links from other web sites that point towards your site as a measure of your sites popularity. This is called Link Popularity. The search engines figure that the more incoming, relevant links you have pointing to your site, the more popular your site must be. As far as the search engine is concerned, if a site is popular it must be relevant.

Here are some basic guidelines to establishing inbound links:

• As a general rule of thumb, link to pages that have a Google PageRank of 4 or more (PR3 if it's a quality link). Sites with a higher page rank are of a better quality and will improve your rankings over sites with lower PR
• Directory listings like those in Yahoo.com, DMOZ.org, Business.com, and many of the various yellow pages are GREAT places to establish links. They may cost you a few bucks annually/monthly but it will probably be well worth it in the long run in both additional visits directly from those sites as well as increased PageRank and higher organic rankings. Our advice would be to spend as little as possible initially and see what kind of return you get. Those sites that produce quality visitors can then get more of your advertising budget in subsequent months/years.
• Pages that have the same keywords and phrases that you are targeting for your website in their title tags are considered to be of higher quality than those without those words.
• URL's consisting of those same words "keyword.html", "keyword-phrase.html", "Another_keyword.htm", etc... are considered to be of higher quality than URL's without those words.
• Sites that are in a similar or related businesses to your own will be higher quality links to obtain than those on a page of an unrelated business.
• Pages with fewer links rather than many links are of higher quality.
• Text links are better than Graphic Links as they can (and should) contain some of your keywords.
• When submitting your site, mix up the text you ask to be used to create the link to your site. For example, "My Keyword Phrase", "Another Keyword Phrase", "My Company", etc... Google seems to be applying a penalty if too many of the text-links being used to link to you also appear in the title tag on your site. So be sure to mix up the inbound link-text as you create the inbound links.
• You may NEED to set up a links page in order to offer reciprocal links to some of these places Just don't name the file "links.html". Use something like "keyword-resources.html" and use this link when asked where to find the reciprocal link.
• DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, link to FFA (Free For All) links pages.

So what does all this really mean.. the best link to establish would be on a directory listing type site, in a related field to your own, that had a PR of 4+, with the keyword you are targeting somewhere in its title tag, and a relatively small number of outbound links.

Hope this helps!

Good Luck with your Links!

Steve Scott
Tampa SEO Training Academy