» Ground Rules for Link Building

I’m sure you know that getting other websites to link to yours is the key to higher rankings. Link building is called off-page optimization. Once you’ve optimized your sites as best you can (called on-page optimization), then you need to work on your link building campaign.

Link building is one the most important SEO factors there are so I’ll cover this in great detail in several posts. Unfortunately, one link isn’t going to get you very far (unless it comes from a wildly popular site like CNN.com and even at that, you wouldn’t want to stop there).

To get anywhere at all on the search engines, you’re actually going to need to follow through with a link campaign. You’ll have to integrate getting links to your site from several different sources.

When it comes to links, there are a few ground rules. I’ve listed a couple of “link building truths” here…

The text used in the link is very important. For example, if I’m linking to my own site and I use the following for the link … Internet Marketing Solution, I’ve just optimized my link for the words “Internet Marketing Solution”. I know that this key phrase is searched for a decent amount on the internet. So having a link with those words in it will give me a little boost in the search engine rankings when someone types in Internet Marketing Solution.

Contrast this with the following link … iMarketingSolution.com. Now I’ve just optimized my site for that particular key phrase. How much more often do you think the terms “Internet Marketing Solution” is typed in over “iMarketingSolution.com”? Well, I’m not sure anyone ever searches for the second one, so it wouldn’t do me much good at all to go out and get 20 links like that one.

So please be very careful of that when you begin your link building campaign. That’s why the absolute first thing I suggest doing is research key phrases with a tool like Wordtracker. At the very least, use the free tools available to you like the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (now Yahoo Search Marketing).

Let me tell you a real quick related story. When I first started out optimizing my very first site in 2002, I didn’t realize the value of the keywords used in the links. So I went out and put links all over with my company name. Of course, I wondered why I didn’t really get anywhere in the search engine results.

Then I ran an analysis on my site to look at the keywords used in the links (this is called anchor text). It finally hit me that they were all my company name which is not what anyone was searching for! It’s no wonder I wasn’t ranking all that high for the keywords I hoped to rank well for.

So just remember to get some good keywords chosen before you before you ever get your first link.

The next “link building truth” is to make it look natural. Don’t use the exact same anchor text and description for each of your links. The search engines may penalize for this (or if they don’t yet, I’m sure they will eventually). So get several key phrases and anchor text written up before you ever start. Then switch them up. If you have a big enough site, chances are, you’ll provide more information than what can be summed up with a single key phrase. So get links with them all the related phrases.

One of the best things to do is get key phrases that are searched a decent amount, but with relatively low competition. Start with those as anchor text. That way you will see a little traffic from the search engines before you try for the more competitive key phrases later. This way you’ll actually feel like you’re getting somewhere (and this is actually more important than you might realize).

I’ll explain how to use Wordtracker for this later on.

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