Search engines want the best, most relevant websites to appear on their results pages for any particular query. Trust is important here – the more trust you can establish with search engines, the easier it will be for your site to gain high rankings.

Building links is one way of doing this. On the Web, a link to a page counts as a ‘vote of approval’ for that page. If lots of different websites all ‘vote’ for your site by linking to it, this is a sign that you have valuable content worth pointing to.

Search engines like valuable content.

However, just as with keywords, not all links are created equal.

Ask Not What Links Can Do For You…

If a search engine finds two pages about ‘bass strings’, where one of them has ten links to it from external sites and the other has ten thousand, it’s probable that the page with more links will rank higher.

However, if the ten links are all from websites that are highly trusted, and the ten thousand links are from link farms and generic free directories, then the site with the ten high-quality inlinks will probably rank higher.

So, to summarise, here’s what you need to do, in ascending order of effectiveness:

1. Get links to your site.
2. Get links to your site using targeted (but varied) anchor text.
3. Get links to your site from trusted websites using targeted (but varied) anchor text.
4. Get links to your site from trusted websites that are topically related to your website using targeted (but varied) anchor text.

…What Can You Do For Your Links?

We have established that links to your website increase its ability to rank for keywords – particularly those keywords used in the incoming anchor text. But how can you get other websites to link to yours?

This is an essential question, and there are many answers. Some require more work than others, some are more effective than others. Let’s have a look at a few to get started with…

• Profile Pages
• Personal Networking
• Forums
• Blog Comments
• Directory Submissions
• Articles
• Social Bookmarking