Link Building - Quality over Quantity

Now don't get me wrong, I think on-page optimization is a key ingredient in any Search Engine Marketing activities you undertake but at the end of the day you will need links. I won't try and tackle which is more important (on-page or off-page factors), at least not right now. What I will attempt in this post is to give you some practical pointers if you're interested in doing any form of link building.


How to find links on your own

Getting the right tools
Firefox is a great browser with some really useful plugins (I do prefer Chrome for daily browsing but Firefox seems to have great plugins that still make it an appealing backup browser). If you're going to be scouring the web for good links you'll want to know which sites have the best PageRank and you can do this by installing the SEO Quake plugin. The really neat feature that you can take advantage of is sorting links (by PageRank) when you're doing searching in Google.

Searching
You can search Google for potential website that will link to you. The following are some examples to get you started.

Searching for pages with "submit site" in their title, as well as the keyword for your niche:
intitle:submit+site "cars"
Tip: Other ideas include using the words add+url or directory or add your site.

You can get creative and target all sorts of blogs, directories, edu sites (or anything else you can think up). The benefit of using this method along with SEO Quake is being able to sort the results by the highest PageRank which can help identify quality sites. Another trick is to change your settings in Google to display 100 results at a time, this is the key to help sort your links and get the most out of your link hunting expeditions.


Link Building Tips

There are a few common sense principles when link building that I'd like to share:
- Try not to go overboard, building 1,000 links overnight is sure to trip some warning bells over at Google
- Vary your anchor text, what's worse then 1,000 links overnight? 1,000 links with the exact same anchor text
- Don't be scared to get NoFollow links, a mix is good
- Avoid "Bad Neoughborhoods" or sites people might consider too "spammy"
- Make your comments useful, spending the extra time doing this will improve your approval rate and mean more links for you

Link Building All too hard?

Like most things in life there's many options to have the leg work done for you. A Search Engine Marketing Expert should be more then capable of obtaining these sorts of links, if you pay them of course.