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The Key to Effective Link Building
By Mikhail Tuknov (c) 2007

A website thrives and indeed survives on the number of hits it
receives from its target audience. This may sound pretty obvious
but it is amazing how many new web sites seem to disregard this
basic tenet, more often than not to their own detriment.

While the creation and subsequent presence of effective links
within your website is a crucial factor in ensuring that your
website is well optimized for search engines, it is still only
one factor and you should take the time to explore other means
by which you can achieve a successful search engine optimization
(SEO) campaign.

This article will be focusing primarily on Link development but
you would do well to be aware of the other factors of successful
SEO such as the Text component, which involves the use of
various words and phrases that your target audience will most
likely type into search queries and the Popularity component
which has to do with the number and quality of links pointing to
a Web site.

One of the most important things to keep in mind and one that
eludes most first-time web developers is that high-quality link
development takes a considerable amount of time. There is simply
no way to get around this fact and many web developers who
resort to the use of spidering software as opposed to actual
human efforts are bound to experience less than satisfactory
results.

Link farms have as of recent times already garnered an unsavory
reputation but for those who are new at this it bears repeating
that you should avoid these at all costs. In almost all cases, a
text link that you purchase from a link farm will have
absolutely no value and therefore have no use for you. Be wary
of sites that feature several links that obviously have nothing
to do with each other and are irrelevant to that particular
site's theme and general content. This is not a hard and fast
rule however, as there are many reputable sites that host a
large number of links. Take your time to determine which ones
can actually be of value to you.

Relevance is of course of primary importance and to this end you
should make sure that any links that you host on your site are
relevant to your content and general theme. You can help ensure
this by targeting most of your link purchases to sites that have
the same subject matter as yours. This will result in a better
link profile that will eventually translate into more publicity
for your site and higher visibility in search engine results.

One of the easiest considerations to miss when you are in the
midst of a link buying frenzy is whether the domain name that
you are buying the link from is actually still operational. Many
domains that are in fact expired still show up in Google so you
may unwittingly fall for one of them. Check the status of the
domains in question yourself and if they are expired it may be
best to avoid them and save yourself the money; they probably
will not be of any use to you.

Probably? Yes, because in some cases, even if the domain has
expired it could still be of some use to you if it has good
backlinks. Whether a site is good or not is largely dependent on
the quality as well as quantity of its backlinks. Both active
and expired domains can have a favorable backlink profile so do
not automatically discount a domain just because it has
expired.

You should of course always check your links for page ranking
and make sure it is the current page ranking and not a fake one.
http://www.digpagerank.com/ is a good site to check your current
page ranking.

One of the most important factors that can affect the quality of
a backlink is the number of outbound links. Generally speaking,
a good quality backlink will have as few outbound links as
possible. The total number of outbound links on a page will also
have an impact on the value of a particular page.

You should also consider the possibility of buying links as a
means of increasing traffic to your site as opposed to buying
links for the purpose of increasing page ranking. This could
potentially provide more direct benefits and even profits for
you.

Some other things to keep in mind: contextual links are
supposedly seen by Google as being more natural and therefore
will prioritize these over other links. .gov or .edu links are
not treated as special in any way by Google so consider
carefully the benefits of hosting such links. Look for a site
that has similar keywords to yours for a better ranking in
Google search engine results page. Finally, it would be best to
avoid purchasing a site wide text link if all the other outbound
links on that site have nothing to do with the site in
question.
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Mikhail Tuknov is a search engine optimization specialist
(http://www.infatex.com/) providing web site search engine
optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC) management and web
analytics services.
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