Link Building

No website can achieve successful search engine rankings for highly competitive keywords without credible, high quality inbound links (other websites linking to yours). Now one might think they can go around and start asking everybody they know to link to them, however that is not a good link buiding strategy, in fact, you may be penalized by the search engines for doing this. Before asking for a link from another website, one must analyze the following factors:

Content Relevance

Incoming links from websites that are relevant to your products, services or information are crucial. For example, if you have a landscaping company, you would want to have landscaping equipment and product websites linking to yours, such as lawn products, tractors, tools, and equipment. Search engines will recognize that the keywords on the linking websites are relevant and they will rate your site as more credible and content relevant.

Website Popularity

Incoming links from websites that are as popular or more popular then your website is important. Search engines rank websites based on popularity and content. Popularity of a website can be measured by several indicators, such as Google Pagerank which measures the importance of a webpage based on its popularity and Alexa Traffic Rankings is also another indicator that should be investigated when analyzing a link partner. Website credibility is another element to look at; search engines favor incoming links from government and educational links (.gov and .com) because the content comes from a creditable source.

Link Saturation

When investigating a link partner, take a look at the link saturation (how many other links are on that webpage) before choosing them. A link from a webpage with only 3 outgoing links is much more favored by the search engines then a webpage with 30 outgoing links.