Welcome to part eight in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed website submissions. In part eight we will be covering the importance of link building and developing inbound links to your website.

This is arguably on of the most important aspect of the SEO process and can mean the difference between first page rankings and 100th. It has to be done right and it has to be done on an ongoing basis.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

1. Keyword Selection (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/keywords.htm)
2. Content Creation (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/content.htm)
3. Site Structure (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/structure.htm)
4. Optimization (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/optimization.htm)
5. Internal Linking (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/internal-linking.htm)
6. Human Testing (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/human-testing.htm)
7. Submissions (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/submissions.htm)
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras

Step Eight – Link Building

Link building: it’s pretty much understood that this is a critical component when you’re trying to attain top search engine positioning however the confusion enters when it’s time to decide exactly what you should do.

From talk about reciprocal link building one might come to believe that this is the golden egg of SEO. While reciprocal link building can definitely be beneficial to your rankings it is far from the only or even the best method. In this article we will cover the following link-building tactics:

· Reciprocal link building
· Directory listings
· Non-reciprocal link building tactics

· Tools to maximize your efforts

And so,Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website – Step Eight: Link Building Articles without further ado …

Reciprocal Link Building

Reciprocal link building is the trading of links between two websites. Essentially it an “I’ll post yours if you’ll post mine” sort of arrangement. There are many sites out there that will essentially link to any-and-all sites willing to link to them. This is not a good practice.

While purely speculation at this point, there is significant debate in the SEO community regarding how search engines might be altering their algorithms to take into account a Webmaster or SEO’s ability to manipulate their rankings with reciprocal links. Whether or not these speculations are true currently, they are most certainly being integrated if they have not be already.

Essentially, the search engines need to protect themselves and provide relevant results to their users. While inbound links as part of search engine algorithms is certainly here to stay, the way these links are calculated changes constantly and in reaction to the current environment and also in prediction of future developments, the way we build them too must evolve.

There are some basic rules to follow when exchanging links:

· Relevancy is more important than PageRank
· Check and make sure the recips aren’t being blocked
· Link pages with more than 50 links aren’t worth exchanging with
· Prepare for the future

Relevancy

Many Webmasters focus only on the PageRank of a website when deciding whether to exchange links with it. Without a doubt PageRank is important however more important is whether or not that website’s content is related to yours. There are two reasons for this:

1. The algorithms are changing to take into consideration the relevancy of links. A link from a relevant PageRank 3 page will be considered more valuable than a PageRank 5 link from a totally unrelated site. Some predict that unrelated links will soon be given little or no weight whatsoever.
2. Believe it or not, Google is not the only search engine. PageRank is Google’s ranking of the value of a site. What Google gives a 3 out of 10 Yahoo may give more weight to.

Basically, after a series of tests we have determined that links to related sites will never hinder your rankings. With this in mind feel free to link to any site you think your visitors would naturally be interested in if they are at your site.

Blocked Recips

Unethical website owners (or their SEOs) will sometimes block the links backs from search engine spiders. Be this in an effort to attain what appear to be one-way links as opposed to reciprocal or simple to make their website appear to have fewer outbound links this is not ethical and it certainly won’t help you.

When you’re looking at a potential link exchange page check the source code for the robots tag. If it’s set to “noindex,nofollow” then the page is being blocked and the link won’t help at all.

Some wiser webmasters will user the robots.txt file to block search engine spiders. If you look for robots.txt at the root of the domain (i.e. at http://www.domainin question.com/robots.txt) you will see the files/folders that are being blocked. Look for the links pages and/or the directory these pages or in, in this list. If you find it, then don’t exchange links with them.

A new one I’ve recently found along this tangent is to draw the links from a script and to block the script and database folders from the search engines. The files won’t show up in the excluded list but the links won’t be counted. To detect this the easiest thing to do is to view the cache of the page. If the page is cached but none of the links appear and the script directory is listed in the robots.txt file then this tactic is being used. Again, don’t bother exchanging links.

If you find Webmasters employing any of these tactics they are unethical. Unethical Webmasters shouldn’t be rewarded with high PageRanks or good results. If you have the time and inclination you may want to email those websites listed on the page (heck, they may be good recip link partners anyways) and let them know what’s going on. You’ll be doing them a favor and they’ll probably be happy to exchange links with you as well.

Link Pages With More than 50 Links

Webmasters who are trying to actually do their link partners a favor will limit their links pages to 50 links (the lower the better). The reason for this is that every page gets one vote. A link to another website counts as a vote for that site. This is why it can help improve rankings. As each page only gets one vote a link from a page with 10 links counts at 0.1 of a vote, whereas a link from a page with 100 links counts as 0.01 of a vote. Anything past about 100 links is not counted at all.

Additionally, this higher up on a page your link appears the more weight it is given. If the page lists sites alphabetically try to insure that your title begins with a number or a letter early in the alphabet (which work well for companies like “Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning”).

Prepare For The Future

Just because a rule applies today does not mean that it will tomorrow. This is true in on-site SEO as well as link building. If generic recip links work today consider whether you believe it’s in the best interest of your targeted engine to keep it this way. As the answer will undoubtedly be “no” it’s in your best interest to insure that you take the extra time to build links that will still be valuable months and even a year from now to save yourself a drop in the rankings and additional work later.

Directory Listings

Having your website listed in quality directories is perhaps one of the most valuable things you can do for it in regards to inbound links. Directories dark web hidden wiki link DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/) and Yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com/) hold significant weight. Google draws it’s directory results from DMOZ and Yahoo draws it’s directory results from, well, Yahoo. These links are given a lot of weight.

Make sure that you submit your website to both of these directories and if they’re not listed a couple months down the road, try again (and you may want to try a slightly different category if a relevant one exists as you may have hit one of the many overworked editors who’s getting behind).

Aside from these two there are literally thousand of other directories our there. Look for others and submit your site. Some may charge a fee. If this is the case take a look at the page your site would be listed on, take a look at the PageRank, the number of outbound links on the page and determine whether it’s worth the price. I’ve seen directories charging $10 for a permanent PageRank 5 link on a page with 3 other outbound links (though this number is certain to grow over time). Well worth the $10 investment.

You can find may great directories using search engines and, of course, the major directories. For example, were I looking for topical directories a great place to start would be http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Directories/ in the Google directory.