Link building is an important way to raise the page rank of your website. Unfortunately, it is also a tricky process that can leave your website with a lower rank, rather than the higher rank you were going for. This happens when you choose the wrong type of link building and build devalued links instead of valued ones.

Types of Devalued Links

There are different types of links. There are great links from authority websites, links that can help your page rank as long as you don’t abuse them and links that will hurt your website. The last type is the type that we will look at here.

Link Exchanges or Farms

Link farms are websites that host hundreds or thousands of links simply for the sake of providing a link. They have no relevant or useful content and many times the sites they host are not even related in topic.

These sites are no longer useful for gaining page rank and can even hurt your site. They may also pose as link “directories,” so be careful when submitting your website to anything that already has many other links posted on it.

Your site can also be devalued by having many reciprocal links. These are when you agree to link to another site and they agree to link to you. A popular way for webmasters to get a lot of reciprocal links is the use of link exchanges. Search engines have caught on to this practice and now devalue many websites that engage in this type of activity.

Forum or Blog Spamming

You should sign your blog comments with your real name, instead of putting links in the author field. These types of links look like link spam to Google and other search engines and in response they will devalue your website.

Likewise, you should join forums in an effort to help others. It is okay to have your website address in the signature field, but don’t list your website address in every actual post. This will have the same effect as blog spamming.

While we’re at it, don’t promote your website in every comment or post. This is still a form of forum spamming, even if Google can’t “see” it. Readers will see right through you and you may miss a chance at some legitimate traffic.

The Best Links

The best types of links that your website can get are natural links from authority sites with a high page rank that have been around for several years. The best way to get these types of links is to provide useful information that others will naturally want to share.

If you can get a website like this to the first page of Google, you will begin receiving natural links. If you find that you aren’t getting natural links, you can also participate in guest posting on related websites that already have a decent page rank.

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Online entrepreneurs know that link building is one of the best ways to increase a site’s rank in search engines and thereby generate more traffic. Despite understanding that link building is an essential component of search engine optimization, many business owners balk at the complicated and time-consuming task of getting well-respected sites to link back to their websites. These 10 tips will give you the guidance and tools you need to maximize the effectiveness of your link building efforts without wasting your time and resources.

1. Check out what your competition is doing. Never underestimate the value of experience, expertise and most important, results. You can discover high-ranking competitors who target your same audience and then determine what their most effective links are.
2. Focus on pages that already rank well for search engine queries you’d like to rank for. Pages that rank well for the keywords you’re using have successfully established themselves as authorities and thus are great pages from which to acquire links. Of course, in order to get a link from those pages, your link will have to add value to them.
3. Investigate the age of prospective linking partners. One of the most significant factors in measuring the quality of a domain is how established it is. Simple queries using readily available free tools can show you how old a domain is, which is one factor in determining how established a website is.
4. Keep the focus on quality. A few high-quality links will benefit you much more than a large number of mediocre ones. Concentrate on established, trusted domains with content that directly relates to your site and target audience.
5. Use effective anchor text. If the words “click here” appear anywhere on your site, fire the person responsible! Internet users don’t need to be told where to click anymore, but search engine users do need to be able to find you; without meaningful anchor text, the chances of that are pretty slim.
6. Provide superior content. The battle may always rage, but now more than ever content really is king, and sites that offer relevant, compelling copy are rewarded in many ways, including by attracting quality links organically.
7. Submit your articles to article directories. Now that you have relevant, high-quality content, submit it to a directory where webmasters can post it to their own sites with a link back to you, driving traffic to your site and creating opportunities for the content to be picked up by trusted sites that bestow link authority.
8. Become a blog commenter. Focus on blog posts that are directly related to your niche and offer commentary that is constructive and useful to the reader.
9. Submit your content to social media sites. Tailor your headlines to individual sites for the best response; the idea is to inspire people so that they spread the word for you, generating quality links in the process.
10. Network via email. Building partnerships with others in your niche can help grow your brand. When writing your email copy, use the same rules you would for articles on your site: Write an attention-grabbing headline and follow it with useful content that benefits the reader.

Guest Author: Randall Davidson is a co-founder of AudioTranscription.Org, a San Francisco-based audio transcription company that provides high quality general and business transcription services. Through founding and developing his audio transcription business, Randall has learned the importance of link building in order to increase search engine rankings and to drive traffic to his site.

When link building, many SEO practitioners face the question: Should I focus on getting thousands of backlinks, or a few quality backlinks? The answer is you want to get as many quality backlinks as you can. Building tons of links might sound like the most effective means of improving your visibility in the search engines, but quality is and always has been more important.

Think about it like this:

Backlinks are like human citation on the web. The way we link out to sites expresses how we feel about them: better sites get more links from more authoritative sites. Just as an expert’s opinion on the news is held in higher regards than your average Joe, a link from an expert site is respected the same way. If you were looking to lose weight, whom would you trust more: an experienced dietician or some random guy you met at the supermarket? Just like we trust those with more credibility and experience in our day-to-day lives, Google trusts sites that display experience and authority more as well. This principle applies directly to link building and how we practice it.

Let’s say you’re the guy from the supermarket earlier, and oddly enough, you actually know your stuff. No one is going to necessarily believe what you have to say without further proof or evidence. But what if there was a health expert nearby that verified your opinions? With the support of an expert, your opinion would now be held in higher regards by others. Similarly, you have a small niche site on health; Google isn’t going to see you as much of an authority. But if you got a link from an authoritative health site…I think you get the idea.

If you are getting a ton of backlinks from non-expert, non-authoritative sources it is going to take a lot of links to achieve anywhere near the results you want. You can improve your rankings somewhat effectively with these types of links, but it takes a ton of them. To compare backlinks with real life again; how many people would it take to convince you of a stranger’s opinion if none of these people seemed qualified to make judgments about said stranger’s opinions? 5, 10, 200, 1,000? In other words, you would probably demand the support of many people if none of them were experts in order to trust this stranger. In the same fashion, Google is not quick to trust and increase the rank of sites with just profile links and other non-authoritative links. However, each one does count a little bit, and I mean a little bit.

We always want to aim for quality over quantity. Vast quantities of low quality backlinks can help, but the core of your link building strategy should revolve around acquiring high quality backlinks. These quality links also often send traffic to your site which is a huge added benefit. You’re not going to get any additional traffic from profile backlinks which is going to leave you entirely reliant upon Google and the other search engines. Most people find a balance in their link building efforts between the two. Find what works for you, and stick to with it until you hit the top.

Guest Author: Ben Jackson is an SEO expert/enthusiast and founder of www.seodiscovery.org.

Are you trying to build backlinks on a budget?  Just because you don’t have tons of cash to throw around on fancy SEO services, your website does not have to get stuck on page 5 of the search engines.

Here are four of the top no-cost link building techniques that get results fast:

Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is a fairly fast and painless link building technique, but most people do it incorrectly because they spam blogs.  Whether you do it yourself or pay someone else, blog spamming doesn’t make sense and won’t get the results you want.  The problem with useless spammy comments is that they don’t get approved.  This leaves you with zero backlinks.

Here’s the right way to do it:

Post a thought provoking, informative comment that might pique the interest of readers.

The benefit, you ask?

For starters, your comment is much more likely to get approved if you actually provide value.  This will increase the number of readers who click-through to your site.  You want people to see your comments and think, “Hey, that’s a great point.  I wonder what else he/she has to say…” *Click*.

If you can establish yourself as an authority in your comment, the people that click-through to your site are already mentally prepped to have more trust and respect for your opinions.  This means they’ll stick around longer, subscribe, maybe even make a purchase, or share your site on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The only other part to the blog commenting equation is finding blogs to comment on.  There are two ways that I consider the best options for finding blogs to comment on.

The first is to use Drop My Link.  You can search for specific types of blogs such as KeywordLuv blogs and add your keyword in the search.  This will help you find a lot of relevant blogs to comment on.  I suggest searching for KeywordLuv blogs first since they allow anchor text, they are “do follow”, and they add a link to your most recent post if you have a blog.  It’s definitely a big win situation.

For the other blog-finding tactic, I suggest using the SEOQuake plugin for Firefox to sort each page of results by PageRank (PR).  A page doesn’t have to have a high PR to be worthwhile to comment on, but it definitely helps.

In summary, using the above techniques will help you quickly find blogs that are relevant, allow anchor text,  are “do follow”, possibly have high PR, and  allow backlinks that attract visitors plus you get an extra link to your blog…and oh yeah… it’s all at no cost.

Google Blog Search

Another great way for finding relevant blogs is to Google your keyword and then click on the “Blogs” link on the left sidebar of the search results page.  This is going to reveal the most relevant blogs/blog posts to your keyword as well as many of the most recent posts that relate to your keyword.

This tactic has advantages and disadvantages compared to the blog commenting tactic explained above.  Its strong suit is that it is more likely to get you traffic and help you rank in the long-term, but no short-term.

The blogs found on Google are all going to be fresh and up-to-date.  A lot of the posts you’ll find with the first technique will find older, less maintained content.  The advantage here is that your comments will be more likely to be approved (faster as well), they’ll have more opportunity to get you targeted traffic, and finally they might end up with PR in the future.

The Google blog search technique has a greater focus on traffic now, and rankings later.  Used together, these blog commenting tactics will help you get that sought after targeted traffic both in the short-term and the long-term.

RSS Submission

In case you didn’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  In other words, it’s a quick easy way to get your content all over the web.  If you have a blog then you already have an RSS feed, but if you don’t, you can still create an RSS feed for your site with www.Html2rss.com.  It’s free and awesome.

There isn’t much of a strategy with using RSS.  Basically, you just want to submit your site’s feed to a bunch of RSS/Blog directories.  These submissions will be found by the search engines and add more backlinks to your profile.  They will also help get your site indexed or crawled more often.

Here are ten of the most popular, highest PR RSS/Blog directories:

www.bloglines.com – PR 9
www.plazoo.com – PR 6
www.icerocket.com - PR 6
www.blogcatalog.com – PR 6
www.bloghop.com – PR 6
www.portal.eatonweb.com – PR 6
www.blogged.com – PR 6
www.bloggapedia.com – PR 6
www.feedcat.net – PR 5
www.feednuts.com – PR 5

One way you can get creative with RSS feeds is to mix and match the URLs with the above mentioned site.  What you can do is essentially compile a list of helpful URLs into an RSS feed with some of yours as well.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is an excellent method for building links.  They’re fast, simple, and effective.  In addition to getting backlinks, social bookmarking also drives traffic, and is great for indexing.  If you created a site recently that you want indexed, you’ll want to start bookmarking.  A Digg or Delicious bookmark alone can get your website indexed in mere hours.

Because of how easy they are to build, bookmarks are great for linking to your homepage and every other page on your website as well as linking to articles, web 2.0 properties, and other backlinks to your site.

One easy-to-use and free tool for bookmark submission is www.socialmarker.com.  It semi-automates the process and takes you site to site while you simply copy and paste your way through.  Another free tool that many SEO practitioners swear by is www.onlywire.com.  The free version of the service only allows 300 submissions per month, but it completely automates the process which allows you to move on to other tasks or even leave the computer while doing your bookmarking.

These popular link building techniques have been used for years by search engine optimizers and Internet marketers, and will not be going away.  Remember, you don’t need expensive software or services to rank well and get traffic to your site.  You can accomplish all of this with just a little bit of effort.

Learn more about the above strategies in this SEO course and laugh your way to the top while your competitors add up their SEO bills.

What other favorite techniques do you have for link building?

Guest Author: Ben Jackson is an SEO expert and enthusiast, and founder of www.seodiscovery.org.

When putting together a website, it’s important to think about optimizing your internal link structure to make sure it’s as search engine friendly as possible. A lot of the time, the potential of internal linking is overlooked in favor of other SEO factors, focusing mainly on the specific pages and not looking at the website as a whole.

When structuring your website, you want to be making it as clear as possible to the engines what pages are most important, what categories exist and what subcategories lay under these. This effect is often done through the initial navigation and via the use of breadcrumb link trails. This is also usually backed up by a sitemap listed in hierarchical order or priority calculation with XML sitemaps.

Another thing that is often overlooked is using the full URL when linking to internal pages (i.e, <a href=”http://www.mirnabard.com/2010/05/9-steps-to-reduce-scraping-and-catch-blog-post-theft/”>). Many times the relative URL is used, (i.e., /category.html). The effect this has on rankings hasn’t quite been determined, but what is for sure is that if any of your content is picked up by scrapers, you will have a full link back to your website.  This helps the page to avoid getting penalized for duplicate content.

Anchor text is important when linking to your internal pages. Often the benefit of this is overlooked, but don’t forget that these are controllable and important links that can tell the search engines a lot about your website. SEOmoz has an interesting post about internal linking.

Another key thing to consider when looking at internal linking is PageRank sculpting, making sure that your website links well to the most important pages is vital. Think about how the search engines are going to look at your website. What pages do you want to make sure they find and understand are important?

By following these steps and making sure newer/deeper pages are well linked to with targeted anchor text from already established pages, you can help to give them a boost in the SERPs.

Guest Author: Ben Hook, a search engine marketer and owner of UK based search engine optimisation company, Navaro.