Linking strategies for your website

Linking linking linking, its all you seem to hear about these day and I agree the right incoming links make a massive difference.

So what sort of links do you need? link farms? free directory submissions? reciprocal? canonical? one way? three way? there are so many different areas of link building and its always expanding.

I beleive .edu domains used to be massively favourable but getting a link from them has always required more than just a simple website, if were talking sme's they are hardly going to have that type of content to get links from .edu sites.

You can start by checking how many links you have incoming, ive found backlinkwatch to be a great tool it will tell you who ranks to you, what anchor text they use and how many outbound links they have on that page, also if the links are nofollow or dofollow. If your smart you can also find out who is ranking to your competitors, if you could get a link from them and how many other people they link to:).

The best sort of links are one way links containing your relevant keyterms within the anchor text from sites of authority or of decent page rank. Thats not to say that you shouldnt get links from lower PR sites. There are many ways of going about this and varying different softwares you can use to manage your campaigns including helping you find sites with outgoing links in your niche that you may well be able to get a link from, advanced web ranking is one of them.

I wouldnt say directory submissions are redundant, however not what they were a couple of years ago, its certainly worth getting a few incoming links from relevant categories in high PR directories, but I wouldnt bother wasting your time on low->0 page rank directories that are full of spam. There are softwares that will submit to lots of directories, mimicking human behaviour but manual submissions are the best way to go, although time consuming.

Alot of people talk about links that 'appear' natural, but the way is that they are natural :) take what you want from the above, but its a start to your link building campaigns. I will write a whole new article on article submissions, blog posting, social bookmarking and the likes at some point soon.

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