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The process of getting more search engine traffic to your web site can be overwhelming. There are an endless amount of things to consider, tricks to try and strategies to put in place. Link building, keywords, landing pages, SEO optimization, social media strategies, on and on and on, it’s enough to make even the most savvy web marketer’s head spin.

Let’s focus on just one piece of the puzzle: link building.

Getting inbound links is one of the best ways to boost your search engine rankings. Inbound links tell search engines that other people think what you have to say is important. A good link building strategy will focus on three major components.

3 Keys To a Successful Link Building Strategy

1. What the inbound links say. The most common way for one web site to link to another is to have certain words hyperlinked. We call this “anchor text,” and it tells search engines (and readers) what the correlating link is about. A good link building strategy (see what I did there?) will focus on developing inbound links that are associated with valuable keywords.
2. How many inbound links you have. One thing that search engines look for when deciding how to rank your web site is how many inbound links you have. As a general rule, the more people are talking about you, the more authority a search engine will assume you have and the higher your site will rank in a search. A successful link building strategy will focus on getting inbound links from a variety of sources.
3. Where the links come from. While you’re trying to get links associated with the right anchor text, you should also focus on getting inbound links from other sites with strong search engine rankings. Think about it in terms of offline marketing. You can get 100 people talking about your company, or you can get a major celebrity to mention your brand on TV. Getting inbound links from a highly ranked web site is like getting a mention from an A-lister. By the same token, you want to steer clear of getting links from questionable web sites that might get you painted with the spam brush.

The best link building strategy will be a well-rounded one that takes all three of these components into consideration.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer from Orlando, Florida.  She has extensive experience writing for search engines and actual people.

Tags: link building, Links, SEO

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Links, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.