There are a lot of things to consider when trying to get other people to link to your site. First of all in their webmaster guidelines Google states: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” Their definition of schemes can be found here .

If you build links intentionally to increase your rankings or page rank you are in violation of Google’s rules and this can and generally will hurt your site should they notice it. You can get penalized or even removed from their index if they feel your violation is bad enough. So don’t shoot yourself in the foot and do lots of work getting a bunch links that will get discounted anyway.

Link building should be very precise. If you go out and get the links they should be ones that bring you traffic from relevant sites. Don’t go out and get a reciprocal link from a dog site when you sell hubcaps. It’s a link that will equate to nothing but wasted time and effort and can easily be seen as violating Google’s rules.

Here are some of the things I do when going out and getting links. I should first say that these tips assume that you’ve done your keyword research and have developed a good list of them.

Building links yourself

Pick a keyword from your list and do a search on it. In case you’re wondering the reason this method works so well is that the sites you find listed are ones that Google considers relevant and at least fairly high quality. So this weeds out the junk that doesn’t matter and would be a waste of time to pursue a link from. Now, browse through the results. I go back as far as 10 or 15 pages. As you browse look for directories (link or article), blogs, reciprocal links pages etc. Write them down. Once you’ve gone back as far as you care to. Take a look at the sites/pages you wrote down.

For each site I look at many factors:

What type of page/site is it? Link directory, article directory, blog, reciprocal links page. Each has their own list things to consider.

Link directory

• how many links are on the page? The less the better. It makes your link easy to find
• Is the page relevant?
• Are the sites listed on the page high quality? If not this is an indicator that the editor doesn’t care about quality which will eventually kill the site in Google
• Where will your site be listed? Obviously the higher on the page the better

Blog:

• Is it a personal or commercial blog?
• Who links to the site?
• Are the posts high quality?
• Look at their blogroll and check out those sites as well.

Article directory

• Is it human edited?
• Look around at the different articles. Are they well written or spammy & poorly written? If they tend to let spammy/poorly written articles in this can be a problem later so avoid it. If the articles are good ones bookmark this site so you can submit your articles here.
• How many articles do they have?
• Are the articles unique or have most of them been submitted to many different directories? You can check for duplicate content here. If the articles listed are nothing but duplicate content or at least the majority of them are Google will more than likely penalize it.

Reciprocal link page

• Is the overall site related to yours?
• Are the sites listed high quality and related to yours?
• How many sites are listed on the page?
• Where will your site be listed?
• How many other recip links pages do they have? If it’s a bunch then you may want to avoid this site as they may get penalized for to many reciprocal links

Does that page that was listed have any PR. If it does it typically means that there are links pointing to it, more than just the on-site links and it’s actively promoted. If you really want to get in-depth check the backlink profile of the links pointing to that actual page to see if they’re good links or junk that will get discounted and lower the value of that page. Having a PR will also keep it out of the supplemental index and allow people to find it and send traffic your way. You can check the backlinks for the page or site using the yahoo site explorer located here

Does it get any traffic? You can check that with Alexa, quantcast, compete. The only problem is that you can’t check individual pages with these tools and you’ll get different traffic estimates from each. The point of looking is to see if there is a decent amount of traffic showing across the board.

Is it easy to find the page on the site? This of course only relates to sub-pages. If it is a sub-page can you get to that page easily. Does it come up high in their on site search results?

Is the site or page truly relevant? Check the meta tags, page content etc to see if the page and the site is truly related to yours.

If you get a good answers to each of these questions then it’s a high quality link that will bring you traffic and boost your presence on the internet.

In part 2 we look at ways of getting other people to link to your site. A practice commonly called link baiting.