by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: March 20, 2010

A SEO strategy should cover two main areas, on-site efforts and off-site efforts. On-site efforts are related to the content, structure and coding on your site, and are totally within the webmaster's control. Off-site SEO, on the other hand, involves getting links with the right SEO friendly anchors to your website and it's probably the part where the worst mistakes can be made. Search Engines frown upon attempts to artificially influence their results, and for them the only valid links should be those that have been initiated by other webmasters in answer to the quality of your content and your position as an expert on the field. However, building incoming links is going to be one of the factors that most affect your website ranking if done right. Instead of focusing on what to do to get incoming links this article will focus on what to avoid when building links to your website so it still looks legitimate and natural, but it's not left entirely to chance and other websites just deciding to link to you.

The first thing to avoid is suddenly building lots of links. A previously unknown web page, or a very recently published one, that suddenly gets hundreds of incoming links all at the same time is highly unlikely and will raise the suspicions of the Search Engines. Spending days just posting links to your website from any possible source (or paying somebody to do it for you) is probably going to be counter effective and may even penalize your website. A slow but regular link building strategy will work much better. 

A popular way of building lots of links in a short time-frame is by using resources such as Hubpages or free hostings to create websites that just link to your page. However, that kind of links won't have nearly the same value as a link from a reputable source (for example, a blogger that is considered an authority on your field). Focus your link building time on creating few but high quality links instead of link farms, directories with hundreds of links along with yours or even worse, paying for links. This also applies to link exchanges, if all the links to your website are there because you linked to another website Search Engines will think you are trying to game the system and give them reduced or no value. Feel free to link to other pages (and many will link back to yours) but remember that every time you link to another site you are, in the eyes of search engines, vouching for that site as a reputable source of content. Do you really want

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>