4 huge factors in linkbuilding

I thought i’d write about this for several reasons. First off,
when examining your competition with a tool like linkdiagnosis
or similar, it’s important to realize what links can push insane
value, which ones are mediocre and which ones are completely
flat and worthless.

Step back, why would you examine your competitors links thru
linkdiagnosis.com or similar? Links are 50% or more of the
Google & Yahoo ranking algorithms and help the engines decide
how popular your website is. It’s thru duplicating your
competitors links that you start to borrow some of the success
they already have with their sites.

Qualities of a good SEO Link

What site is the link on?

The website the link is posted on should be relavent to your
niche in some way. Maybe they supply materials, they’re also
in your industry or something.

It’s also nice to get some .Gov & .Edu links and even some
.ORG links (the domain of the linking site) pointing to yours.
(i’ll be describing that soon in the new book "linkbuilding 2009)

Other very important factors to consider are the age of the site
you got the link from, and the amount of popularity it holds.
Obviously a more popular and older site is more valuable than
a younger less popular site.

Where is the link?

A link from CNN.com isn’t good enough if they link to you
somewhere far in the nether regions where no one will see it.
But it’s good for rankings, right? Not neccesarily. The better
links are found in content and editorial links found dead
center of the website where the articles themselves reside.

The second best are those in the navigational menus on the
top and right hand side. The ones at the bottom carry less
weight. It makes sense, I mean if i shove a link down there
I bet 90% of the time it’s to forget about it or I was obligated
to put it there somehow, it’s not as important as the centre
stage stuff.

The anatomy of the link itself

The next thing to consider is the text of the link itself and how
it looks. A link that goes to your website with a keyword like
furnace installation is much better than one that just goes
straight to your name.. BUT.. it’s better to have variety and
some http://www.mywebsite.com links and some "My Keyword "
links to even things out.

Some places you submit to will let you control the text on
the link. Directories let you choose a title that often becomes
the blue clickable text, some forums & online sites actually
let you use an HTML description which allows you to create:

<A HREF="http://www.yourwebsite.com">My keyword</A>

Fast links can hurt, sometimes…

It’s my experience that only some types of links are penalized
for being built too fast, and some may argue that with me but
I suppose i could easily pull tons of case study examples to
show otherwise.

An example… If you send out a press release, can you control
That all of the sudden 200 people copy that release and
re-distribute it all over the web with your link in it? Obviously
not! However, 50 directory submissions in one day? Yeah, that’s
obviously not realistic.

Some obvious natural link builders:
* Social bookmarks
* Site shares (digg, stumbleupon)
* Press releases
* Bloggers

Some obviously submitted by you links:
* Blog Comments
* Article submissions
* Directory Submissions
* Forum signups

Until next time
Daniel J Deyette
LinkBuilding Service