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To effectively use inbound links to build your rankings on relevant SERPs (search engine results pages), it's important to remember two words: quality and quantity.

 

Quantity is simple. The more links you have coming into your site, the better. But Google – the king of all search engines – is savvy. The Google team knows that there's ways for sneaky web marketers to trick the system, building their never-ending list of links with not-so-genuine tactics, like blog comment spamming or link farming. These kind of SEO techniques are commonly referred to as Black Hat SEO, and you want to stay away from them. Sure they may get you results at first, but Google will eventually catch on and will remove your web from their indices all together.  Then it won’t matter how well you optimize your pages because they won’t even consider them. Not a good thing!

 

Because these kind of black hat SEO tactics are used, search engines complicate their algorithms with other factors in order to provide quality, relevant search results to their users. One such consideration with link building is quality, and it’s a little more difficult to achieve than quantity.

 

When looking at the quality of a backlink you need to look at the relevance and popularity of the website that is linking to you. Relevance means that the website has something to do with your website and the desired key phrase. If you’re selling cars, for example, you’ll want to concentrate on links from popular car blogs, car club sites, car dealers and the like. A bunch of links from cat lover websites won’t help you as much.

 

You should also focus your efforts on websites that are popular. Do they get a lot of traffic? Do they achieve high search engine rankings themselves? And are these rankings for keywords that are related to your website?

 

 

The anchor text used on the link is also important. Anchor text refers to the visible words that are hyperlinked on the website to yours. What you want to strive for are backlinks that use anchor text relevant to your topic, or, better yet, include the exact key phrase you’re optimizing for.

 

For Example:

 

“Mellon & Co. posts new blog on building backlinks for website SEO”

 

In this sentence, SEO is the anchor text and the hidden link is - http://mellonco.com/index.php/programming.

 

Anchor text optimization is a topic in and of itself, both for internal and external linking strategies. To read further about anchor text optimization, check out this blog on webpronews.com.

 

You’ll also see better results from one-way backlinks, rather than reciprocal links. Websites that link to your website, without you linking back, are more valuable than if you were provide a link back.

 

All of these factors are considered by search engines to help weed out the high-quality websites that provide what users are looking for, namely valuable content, from low-quality websites. So maybe some of the best advise we can give those looking to increase search engine rankings is to listen to your website visitors. Who are they? What do they want? And how are you going to provide what they want in a well-developed website that is search engine friendly? Quite a challenge, and one that we'd be happy to help you with. Just give us a call!