SEO Consultants have been telling us for years that building incoming links to your website is now one of the most important factors that search engines look at when ranking your website within the search engines for your chosen keywords.

The problem is how to get these links and what should the link contain.

Many years ago the search engines used to look at the quantity of links pointing towards a website to rank it highly, this is no longer the case. Search engines are looking at the quality and relevance of the links and have got a whole lot smarter in recognizing people using link farms and the like. Using these services can seriously damage your websites reputation within the search engines and can even get your site removed from the index.

So how do you get a quality link?

The majority of Home Business will use suppliers, these are your first port of call when embarking on a link campaign. You are buying from them regularly so the least they can do is provide you with a link from their website. The chances are that these suppliers are highly relevant to your industry and have high pagerank websites for you to take advantage of. Depending on your business there will be a few areas relevant to your industry that aren’t in direct competition with you, this is where to go next. Approach the owners of the relevant Internet Marketing website(details can be viewed by doing a whois lookup)and ask them if they can add a link from their website to yours. The chances are they will be interested but only if you cross their palms with silver(or gold in some cases). The fact that they are asking for money is not too much of a problem as it then gives you the ability to negotiate that perfect link.

The Perfect Link

Although it is sometimes enough just to have your website url listed on a relevant, quality website going that extra mile to create the perfect link is something that you should aspire to achieve. When conducting a good link strategy always go for a relevant website and vary the pageranks from each website. What you are trying to achieve is an Organic Link Building strategy that looks natural to the search engines, so just targeting high pagerank websites will look unnatural. The next thing to look at is what the link actually says, this is called anchor text. For example if you have a website about dog training and it is a targeted keyword, use the words “Dog Training” or variations of it. Try not to use the exact same words every time you create a link because this will also appear unnatural.

Most Search Engine Optimization SEO specialists will tell you that this is enough to create a quality link and in most cases they would be right – but what we are looking for is the perfect link.

Going back to the fact that most webmasters will charge, we need to negotiate that perfect link. What I mean by this is getting a full page of well written content on the webmasters site and applying anchor text links within the body of that unique quality content but also not forgetting to link to a highly authoritative site within that body such as Wikipedia or the BBC’s website, this gives our links more authority. Having our own page within the website allows it to be indexed in its own right and will allow for us to target the page using the Metatags. (although this doesn’t hold too much weight now it is still good SEO practice). Once this has been achieved you will have the perfect link and within a few weeks should start to benefit from it, seeing your website rise up the search engines. You are now a link building specialist.