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BEST PRACTICES IN SEO LINK BUILDING

 

Although the statement of “get as many links as possible” was true until 2 years ago, the constant changements of the seach engine algorithm to avoid spamming obliges seo experts to focus more on links coming from relevant websites.

Here are some tips and best practices for prioritizing your link exchange efforts:

1- Only exchange links with sites that are relevant to, similar to, or are in the same or a complementary customer market as your own business.

2- Start by looking at other sites that are listed in the OPD and in Yahoo under the same category as your site. These make great sites to start focusing on.

3- Do a search in Google and see what the top 30 sites are for your top keyword phrases. These are either your competition or prominent complementary sites to your own. Brainstorm other products or services that your customers may also find useful.

4- Focus first on getting links from sites with a PageRank (PR) of 4 or higher. Links from sites with a PR = 3 or less won’t influence your ranking negatively, but you probably won’t be getting an appreciable boost from Google unless you have a large number (more than 100 or so) of these.

5- However, don’t discount the power of even low PR sites directing traffic to your site over time. Today's PR = 3 site could be tomorrow's PR = 6 site, and vice versa. Don’t fret over the PR of the site, remember this is a long-term continual effort on your part to get more links!

6- Your best links will be from sites that have a large number of incoming links themselves and that also have a relatively small number of outgoing links (such sites are called authorities). Just make sure these sites are relevant to your theme or keywords.

7- Try to get your link on a page that is as close to their home page as possible. A link is less important (has less PR) if it is buried several levels deep. For example a link on, http://www.acme-house-plans.com/links.htm is better than a link on http://www.acme-house-plans.com/Links/SectionA/links.htm.