It is no secret that Google’s search engine is driven by links. The more links you have to your website the greater chance you have of ranking #1 for the keywords of your choice - but not all links are created equal. Here are some tips to get the most out of the links that are being sent to you.

1) Get High Ranking Pages Linking To You

The higher Page Rank that the page linking to you has, the more valuable the link is for you. One link from a Page Rank 6 or 7 page is worth more than hundreds of Page Rank 0’s and 1’s. Also remember that each page on a domain has its own Page Rank. Just because the homepage might be a 6 it doesn’t mean that the page with your link on it will also be a 6. Try to get your link on the page with the highest Page Rank possible.

2) Get Relevant Links

Google has recently put a lot of effort into checking into the relevancy of the links you get. If you get a link from a page Rank 6 page that has nothing to do with the content on your site then Google will not recognize the value of the link. If, for example, you have a website about fishing you are best off getting links from fishing related websites as supposed to ones which discuss computers, houses, or any other unrelated topic.

3) Get Quality Anchor Text

The anchor text in a link is the blue text that is underlined and when you click on it leads to your page. Usually it reads something like click here or learn more. Google considers whatever the anchor text is to be extremely valuable in determining the relevance of the link. Try to recommend a number of different targeted keywords for your link partners to use in their anchor text to help increase your rankings.

4) Make Sure The Link Does Not Have NoFollow

Google introduced a ‘nofollow’ tag that webmasters can use on links that allow people to click through on the but sends a message to Google that they do not want to pass on any credit to the website they are linking too. Many bloggers have turned on nofollow on their links to prevent people from spamming their blogs with comments. If your link has the nofollow attribute then Google will not recognize that you have received a new link. Ensure that with all of your link partners they do not have the nofollow listing for your link.

5) Submit Your Link Pages To Google

Whenever you get a new link to your site you want to let Google know that the page exists. Google can often be very slow to pick up new pages and sometime they don’t pick them up at all if the site you’re on is poorly structured. To make sure you get the credit you deserve, submit the link to Google by using the Add your URL to Google tool. It’s a surefire way to make sure that the hard work you put into building your links pays off in higher rankings.

Building links is an important part to any SEO strategy - just make sure to follow the above five rules to get the most from your link building campaign.

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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