SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is probably one of THE most important things you can do for your website. You could have the best designed site with the absolute GREATEST content, but without being optimized it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Tip #1: Use Lowercase URLs

This is probably the easiest and quickest little boost you could give your ranking.

Depending on your server’s operating system, file names and/or directories may or may not be case sensitive. So, casing in your URLs could mean trouble.

For example, http://www.yoursite.com/portfolio.html and http://www.yoursite.com/Portfolio.html are two completely different URLs if your server is running a UNIX system. However, if your server is Windows based, then those two URLs would be one and the same.
Now just throw in the fact that www.yoursite.com and WWW.YOURSITE.COM are always going to be the same domain, and the possibility of confusion is almost inevitable.

So, the best idea is to make all file and directory names lowercase by default. This way you do not have to worry about whether or not your URLs are going to get processed correctly.

Tip #2: Dislodge Your Underscore Key

Ok, so you don’t really have to remove the underscore key from your keyboard… However, it is certainly a good idea to refrain from using the underscore and/or periods in your file names.

We’ve all seen them… The super long page name separated by underscores.

http://www.yoursite.com/my_photo_gallery_page.html

File names like this are all too common, and are detrimental to SEO.

So, why do we do it?

1. Three main reasons:We think like humans, not like computers.

We look at a line of text and read it as words, and therefor attempt to separate it accordingly. Computers on the other hand do not. A computer sees characters and couldn’t care less about it being “human readable”.
2. Underscores are promoted when picking usernames and/or email addresses

Most sites will allow the underscore to be used as a separator when choosing your username and/or email address. This makes it all that much more common for us to use the underscore key more often.
3. Underscores look more like spaces

When viewing a page and/or file name that has been separated by underscores, our brains process the gap between the words first as a regular “space”. So, it isn’t too far fetched to say that this could be a contributing factor in why people use the underscore to separate words in page/file names.

So why is it bad?

Well, the underscore is often difficult to notice and even more difficult to type. Also, using separators of any kind when naming files is usually a sign of a poorly designed site structure.
So how do we fix it?

Easy! Simply put… DON’T USE UNDERSCORES!
If you find that you just have to use some sort of separator in your file names, it is less detrimental to use the hyphen ( – ).

Tip #3: Be A Title Tell

Have you ever visited a site and noticed that in the browser’s title output area, it only reads “index.html” or “Blank”?

This is because that person did not utilize the <title> tag. The title tag (or “title element”), is used to identify the contents of a page. It is one of the most important steps to improving your optimization level, yet it’s one of the most frequently discarded.

Another thing people don’t seem to realize is that each page has to have it’s own unique title. I have personally seen countless sites that use the exact same title for each page. This gives no indication as to what kind of content is on each individual page.

It is important when picking your title, you should use keywords and/or keyword phrases that are targeted in that particular page. For example, if we had a page where we were selling Keebler Elf Memorabilia and our shop is located in Arkansas…
Ideally our title should look something like this:
<title>Keebler Elf Memorabilia | Arkansas</title>

There is no “set length” for the title tag, however you should be aware that if it is too long it can and could be truncated. I would recommend keeping your title tag text below 63 characters (including spaces).

Tip #4: HALT… In the name of SEO!

A critical, but all too often overlooked step in optimization is including the “alt” attribute to your images. This is quickly becoming more and more important to SEO, and should not be taken lightly.
Also, the alt attribute is required for valid (X)HTML.

I won’t go into a full blown explanation as that only bore you. Just know that there are a few guidelines for the alt text you add to your images.

1. Don’t try stuffing your alt attribute with keywords

This is an approach which many of the “less reputable” SEO consultants will use to attempt to get a higher keyword density. However, this approach can actually hurt your page more than help it. If your keyword density is too high, that could automatically trigger the spam filter.
2. Convey in text what the image conveys visually

This is probably the most commonly mistaken aspect of the alt attribute. The alt attribute is not necessarily supposed to be a description of the image.
* Here are a few examplesIf you have an image that’s used as a button that leads the user to the “checkout” page, the proper alt text would not be “Checkout Button”. Instead, it should be “Go to checkout” or something relatively close to that.
* Say you have an image of a magnifying glass used as your “search button”, the corresponding alt text should read “Search” or “Submit Search” or “Submit Query”
* If you are using an image which is purely for “decoration” purposes, that image should either be used as a background image in CSS or you should add the alt attribute and leave it blank.
Like so: alt=” “

That’s as deep as I’m going to get into that particular subject, as it’s nearly never ending. I will however, point you in the direction of where you can find more detailed information if needed.
Google’s FAQ is chock full information about the matter.

Tip #5: Update Update Update!

Though it may seem like a rather monotonous job to update your site with new and fresh content frequently, this can dramatically increase your rankings. A steady flow of new and RELEVANT content can help to get your site noticed by the major search engines.

This doesn’t mean that you can post 10 blog entries per day about absolutely nothing and get a better pr score, you need to post content which is relevant to the overall scope of your site and that includes targeted popular keywords and phrases.

Keep in mind that this is only the “tip of the iceberg” so to speak. These are just simple, quick ways that you can help to improve your relevancy to the net. If you put into practice each of the tips mentioned above, you can expect to notice a difference in your ranking.

I’m not guaranteeing that you will be bumped to the top, but you should notice a difference no matter how small. Every little bit counts, right?

DM

After the public announcements and claims done by Rand Fishkin, Stephen Spencer, Danny Sullivan and even Matt Cutts, that directing the link juice to the important pages of a website improves the Search Engine Ranking of a website, the SEO community is using nofollow on anything they don’t want to rank for, claiming it a ‘wastage of link juice’ otherwise. But I personally believe that this nofollow practice is taking the SEO community no where, as webmasters have a license to get away to rank their websites even with a poor internal navigation and hence poor user experience.

So obviously the nofollow era is facilitating more spammy websites making it to the top of the Search Engine lists. It’s just matter of time, when Google will take an evasive action.

If we have a look at the origin of a nofollow attribute, we find that nofollow attribute was made with the primary motto to combat comment spam (which it has failed miserably as comment spammers are still employed). Further Google found that nofollow can also help Google bots to firstly determine the most important pages out of huge websites with complex blog categories in little time and secondly the webmasters could use nofollow while linking to some website content which they don’t want to get associated with and vote to. Here is a recent precise statement made by Matt Cutts on use of nofollow attribute:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

Now getting back to my anti-nofollow visionary, the nofollow tags also facilitate a fake information architecture. As we know Google ranks the sites with solid internal navigational architecture higher on SERP as these are the sites which provide rich user experience to the Google users as the important content is just 3 clicks away, nofollow isn’t helping to their cause. Coz what most webmasters are doing at the moment is hoarding the page rank and shooting it on the targeted pages even when the target page is nothing but pure crap and weakly linked from other pages of the site.

Having said that, please don’t take me wrong, as I am not questioning the effectiveness of page rank sculpting, because it’s working great at the moment, but I am not too sure how long will this nofollow rampage last: I am afraid not too long. So I have a simple advise to give – use nofollow but only after you have crystallized your internal navigation and don’t rely 100% on this nofollow ploy as you might soon see Google derank the websites with weak internal structure indulging in page rank sculpting.

DM

However, before you get excited about dynamic pages and race off to learn PHP, there is a downside to these web pages: Search engine bots cannot see them. And if they can’t be seen by the bots, they can’t be indexed by the engines.

The purpose of this article is to show you how you can index your dynamic pages with the search engines, and some of the pitfalls that you can avoid when submitting these to Google et al.

What is a Dynamic Page?

As mentioned above, a dynamic page is a static webpage that dynamically pulls it’s content from an external source – usually a web database such as mySQL.

This has many benefits, not least of all for the designer, whom only needs to create one webpage design. If he wishes to update his site, he need only change the one page and all pages presented to the end user will be changed too (as they all use the same template and change content dynamically, of course).

So you can use dynamic pages any time that you have information that is categorized by date or if you use an ecommerce shopping sites. Dynamic pages are also compatible with multiple service providers; so no need to worry about cross-browser support or migrating your site to another host (migrating the database is another issue).

You can spot dynamic pages as you surf around the web by looking at their URLs. Dynamic pages contain the character “?” or one of “#&*!%” within their link, such as www.yourdomain.com/?page=10

So What is the Issue?

The issue is the characters used in the URL. These instruct the webpage to send a command to the web server to fetch the content from the web database. So, in essence, the content isn’t retrieved unless the web page asks for it.

Googlebots, and other bots for that matter, cannot send commands to the web server, and so cannot retrieve the content. Remember: if they cannot see it, they cannot index it.

Additionally, some black hat SEO people and spammers use the same characters to trap search engine spiders. When you consider both of these reasons, it’s not hard to see why the spiders are both unable and unwilling (if you can say such a thing about a program) to index your dynamic pages.

So I’m Stuck Then?

Not at all. As webmasters, we have to be a little more imaginative in dealing with the issue of non-indexing and there are plenty of white hat SEO options available to you.

Make regular static pages that link to your dynamic pages
This one is really simple. On areas of your site that are static (and therefore can be indexed), add a link to your dynamic page.

Google and the others will be able to access the page via this link, and index the result. Also, please remember to optimise your anchor text too. You can read how to optimise anchor text in another article.

Make blogs or blog posts that link to your dynamic pages
Similar to the previous suggestion, but involves linking to one dynamic page from another. The difference is that, as well as linking from your blog/post, your blog post would also be submitted to various websites or feeds, such as Digg, DropJack etc.

As these sites are heavily crawled by Google, they will also index your blog articles. Once these are indexed, their “child” links will also be picked up too.

Optimize any dynamic pages that need to be indexed
Just because your page is dynamic, this is no reason to ignore the importance of on-the-page SEO.

Look at your metatags, including the title, and optimise wherever possible. Optimise the content itself. Good content attracts both search engines and visitors. Check your keywords and their densities. In short, do everything that you would do if the page were static.

Articles and content pages
If your dynamic pages are articles, such as a blog post, submit the article to webfeeds and sites, such as Digg.

As mentioned earlier, these sites are heavily crawled and indexed, and, even with a link to a dynamic page, Google will index your page with ease.

Link to your dynamic pages with a table of contents
Create a single page sitemap of your dynamic pages. Do this for your web visitors – not for the search engines – and optimise the anchor text.

The benefit of this is that the static sitemap page will be indexed quickly, depending on the directory depth of the page, and, likewise, the pages it links to will also be indexed.

Rewrite Your Page URLs with .htaccess
This is an extremely powerful, but potentially complex, means of dealing with the issue of dynamic page indexing.

Basically, a rewrite can change your url from yourdomain.com/?page=10 to yourdomain.com/dir/page10/. This works with Apache servers, and is well worth considering, if not implementing.

This rewrite rule will convert pages like this yourdomain/posts.php?page=1 to yourdomain/posts/page1

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^files/([^/]+)/([^/]+).zip /posts.php?page=$1&file=$2 [NC]

Of course, this assumes that you are using PHP as your dynamic page language.

If you are interested in this option, the Apache documentation covers mod_rewrite in much more detail.

So if you really need dynamic pages, remember to set them up so that the Googlebots can see and record all the information on your site. As illustrated this is not an impossible task. It is just a question of working within the Google rules to help those bots to read all the information in your site.

DM

Link: www.yourdomain.com

The above command gives you a selective list of links, usually from PR4+ link pages. For a more extensive list, you may search the following syntax -

“yourdomain.com” -site:www.yourdomain.com

There are also tools available, such as SEOElite, that will provide more analytical information about your links.

History behind Link Popularity and Google PageRank

The web, by its very nature, is based on hyperlinks, where sites link to other prominent sites. If you take the logic that you would tend to link to sites that you consider important, in essence, you are casting a vote in favour of the sites that you link to. When hundreds or thousands of sites link to a site, it is logical to assume that such a site would be good and important.

Taking this logic further the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page formulated a Search Engine algorithm that shifted the ranking weight to off-page factors. They evolved a formula called PageRank (named after its founder Larry Page ) where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and assign it an importance score on a scale of 1-10. More the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

Google’s PageRank is important because it is one of the primary off-the-page factors that influences your page’s ranking in the search engine result pages.

PageRank in Google’s own Words

Google explains PageRank as follows ( http://www.google.com/technology/):

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

For more information on Google PageRank, go to

http://www.google.com/technology/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html

Benefits of Building Link Popularity

Building Link Popularity is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective Search Engine Optimization campaign today. The ‘off-page’ factors such as link popularity, PageRank and Anchor Text in incoming links play a major role in your site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Search Engines consider your site more important if more links point to your site. Building link popularity improves the PageRank of your web pages (Read more about PageRank). The higher the PageRank of your website, the higher its importance for search engines and higher it gets ranked in the search engine result pages. Search engines also take into account the PageRank of the pages that link to your site and its industry relevance to your own industry. Links from higher PageRank pages and industry relevant sites give your site a higher value.

Types of Links

There are two types of links you can establish on the web. One way is to trade links (Link Exchange), where you give a link from the links Page on your site to the partner sites. The second method is to establish ‘only-incoming’ links also called ‘one-way links’ or ‘Non-Reciprocal links’.

Only-Incoming Links

Only incoming links are the links established on the other websites where you do not need to link back to them. There are various compelling reasons and methods to establish such one-way links which include linking back from a different website that you may own, publishing articles on sites, content syndication, listing in trade directories and giving out press releases in news networks.

Link Exchange

Link exchange is an easier way to establish links from other websites to your website. In link exchange process, you trade links with prospective partner sites by offering a link to their site from your own site. This method is a fast way to establish several hundred links to your website. However, it may not get you great benefits.

Only Incoming Links vs. Link Exchange

Google developed the PageRank algorithm to provide authentic and quality information while making it difficult for webmasters and site owners to contaminate the search results by artificially inflating their PageRank.

The new algorithm came into effect with the launch of Google in 1998. Google’s PageRank was based on the logic that more the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

As webmasters realized the importance of PageRank, they found ways to artificially inflate their PageRank by manipulating direct link exchanges. This defeated the very essence on which the Google PageRank algorithm was build. To counter this, Google has constantly been fine-tuning and updating its algorithms.

The search engines are aware that a large number of sites are deploying link exchange campaigns to boost their site’s PR. Search engines are working towards fine-tuning their algos to discount direct link exchanges in order to preserve the effect of their link popularity related algorithms and rationalize artificially inflated links popularity of sites.

While the algos are yet to reflect this change, I believe that it may happen soon enough. In the long run, I recommend investing your resources in an ‘ only-incoming links ‘campaign for your website which is likely to benefit your site more as opposed to a direct link exchange campaign.

Important Parameters to Consider while Building Link Popularity

Some of the important parameters that you need to consider while establishing links with any website are discussed below:

PageRank or PR of the Linking Page

PR of the linking page is one of the most important factors. PR of the linking page determines how much value of importance is passed on to your page. Higher the PR of the linking page, higher the value you get. The home page PR is not as important, but it is an indicator of how much PR a linking page may jump to, in due course of time. For instance, if the PR of the site’s link page is 0, but the home page PR is 6, then, there is a bright possibility that in a month or two, the link page PR may also jump to a PR of 4 or even 5 due to the internal linking structure of the partner site. While sites would be happy to give out links from a PR 0 page, you can estimate that in two months time, this link page can jump to a high PR, giving you great value in the future.

Identifying Total Number of Links on the Link Page

The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PR value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page. Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 outgoing links is much better than getting a link from a PR4 page that has 60 outgoing links. With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links. It is therefore as important to evaluate the total number of outgoing links on a links page, as it is, to evaluate the PR of the linking page. This is where many people often falter, as they usually insist on getting a link from a high PR page, but if that page has 100 outgoing links, your page would only get 1/100th of that value.

Industry Relevance

Search engines give high importance to links pointing to your site from your own industry segment as opposed to those from an un-related industry. For instance, a hotels and reservations website is likely to benefit more from links pointing from a related industry site like travel, vacation packages or cruises, than those from an unrelated industry like a drug site.

Industry relevance also needs to be given a high weight while creating resource directories. For example, if you have a site related to hotels, then you can create a resource directory related to your business that could be pertaining to travel, tourism, cruises, vacation rentals, vacation packages, car rentals, food and beverages etc.

Page Relevance

Most sites offering links have several categories listed on their sites. Try and get a link from a category that closely matches your own industry. For instance, if you have a site related to hotels, then, on your partner site, a tickets site for example, try and identify a resource directory pertaining to hotels, resorts, reservations, vacation packages, travel, tourism, food and beverages etc. If the concerned site has a directory on hotels, you should request a link in that category, as a link from that page would be relevant to a hotels site, thus getting you more benefits. An algorithm called “Applied Semantics” determines the industry relevance of a page within a site. Applied Semantics algorithm studies various keywords on a web page and tries to determine the industry or business segment of each page. Applied Semantics estimates the industry segments that are relevant to a particular page. If the link to your page is coming from your business specific segment, then you are likely to draw more benefit.

Anchor Text

Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text on a web page. Since anchor text is very important, make sure that your most important keywords appear in anchor text from the link pointing to your site. You should try and work with at-least 10-20 keyword and link text options. If you are creating a large number of links using only one standard link text, then the search engines are likely to detect a pattern. It is possible that future algo updates may do away with all repetitive and similar looking links to your site. You can also refer to our article on Anchor Text Optimization for more details.

Link Page Title

As well as the anchor text of the link back to your site, the page title is also taken into account. We have already discussed the importance of the title tag in your own on-the-page SEO campaign, and this also counts when linking back to your domain. Where possible, try to gain links from pages that have your keywords in their title too. This also helps with the page relevance.

Pre-Indexed Pages

Try and find link partners in Search Engines like Google and Yahoo, and check if the links page is already indexed in the search engines. Search Engines frequently re-index the pages in its database. They are likely to detect your link faster on a page already existing in their database as compared to a ‘yet-to-be indexed’ page. The safest way to check is to copy the prospective link page URL and paste it into Google Search. If the page is indexed, Google would show a result in response to your search, otherwise it would respond with a ‘no result found’.

The robots.txt File

robots.txt is an exclusion file that contains specific instructions for search engine robots regarding the content they are not allowed to index. Links placed on a page that the search engines robots are not allowed to index, would not benefit your site. Considering the importance of robots.txt file, it is a good idea to study a site’s robots.txt file to identify the excluded pages before approaching a site for establishing links with your site. Read our article on Working with robots.txt file.

Dynamic Link Pages

You should also watch out for any link pages that are generated dynamically. Chances are that such pages would not get indexed soon enough, which means that a link from such a page would not benefit you. Some dynamic link pages are intentionally generated in such a way so as to prevent them from getting indexed. Some unscrupulous webmasters do this to trick you to prevent any PageRank leaking from their site to yours. Links from such pages therefore do not give you any benefit.

Java Script Link Pages

It is also important to identify pages that are generated through Flash or a Java Script, as Search Engines cannot read flash pages or the links embedded within flash. These are some of the tricks unethical webmasters use. While a site can claim to have placed a link to your web page, in effect they are not giving you any benefit.

Re-Directed Links

A link that is first re-directed to another page within your partner site before pointing to your site is a re-directed link. You should watch out for such links, as search engines do not give weight to re-directed links. It is very unlikely that your site would draw any benefit from a re-directed link.

Frame Sites

Avoid getting links from framed sites as search engines cannot read texts within frames. A link placed on a frame site would not get your site any benefit, as search engines would not be able to recognize such a link.

Directory Depth

It is important to evaluate the depth of the directory of the linking page. Avoid getting links from pages that are embedded in a very deep directory or pages that are more than two directories deep (e.g. www.domain.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/linkpage.php is not a good link page). Deep directories seldom earn high PR. They are also slow in getting indexed, if at all.

Building Link Popularity is a great way to help your site gain competitive PR. Links from other sites also sends direct human traffic to your site. Observing a little care in developing links will go a long way in getting your site rank high in search engines. 

DM

Link building improves the search engine ranking of your webpage if done in specific ways. Besides an improved search engine ranking, there are certain other benefits that your website derives from carrying out a link building campaign.

Link popularity is usually viewed in isolation, and, unfortunately, most webmasters do not realise the complete benefits of a well-defined campaign. While improvement in rankings for specific keywords is a very important objective of link building, it is not the “only” way a link building campaign can be beneficial to a website.

Listed below are the 7 benefits of Link Building:

1. Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that falls within a hyperlink leading to another page. The Anchor Text of Incoming Links plays a major role in your website’s ranking in the search engine result pages. Anchor text is very important from ranking point of view as your most important keywords are used in the links pointing to your website which help in gaining rankings in SERPs.

For wider keyword coverage, you can work with different link text options. It is important to have a number of combinations of anchor texts and associated link texts, so that the linking does not have a fixed pattern that the search engines can detect. This has become even more significant due to recent Algorithm updates of major Search Engines.

If you have more number of quality links pointing to your website, the keywords within your anchor text would benefit your website’s ranking greatly for those particular keywords. The web page of your site that the link is pointing to should also be optimized for that keyword(s) in order to properly influence rankings.

As you can probably infer, anchor text is incredibly important in SEO terms, and warrants its own article. The next article will cover the finer points of the anchor text element.

2. PageRank

PageRank is Google’s measure of importance assigned to a web page on a scale of 1 to 10. By undertaking a long-term link building campaign , you can boost your website’s PageRank and improve your website’s ranking significantly. Most other major search engines have adopted this logic in their own algorithms in some form or the other, varying the importance they assign to this value in ranking websites in their search engine result pages. Search Engines consider your website more important if more links point to your website.

3. Direct Traffic

Link Building also benefits you by way of getting direct traffic to your website. Incoming links from other websites would surely pay high dividends, as users are likely to click on that link and visit your website, thus bringing you direct traffic. The links placed on relevant pages would enhance the amount of relevant traffic to your website. A well planned Linking Popularity Building Campaign can also help you target your potential customer market and thus increasing the amount of valuable traffic to your site and thus even help improve your sales to some extent.

4. Deep Indexing

Another important benefit of Link Building is that a webpage embedded deep in your website too stands good chance of being indexed by the search engines. An external link leading to a page embedded deep in your site would help that webpage get indexed by the search engines, which would have otherwise taken a very long time (upto 3 to 4 months)

While indexing a page, search engines would also index the links leading from that page even if they are embedded very deep in your site structure. Search engines while indexing that particular page would also learn about the other links within your website and move on to index other pages too..

5. Indexing Dynamic Pages

Many of the Search Engines used to find it difficult to index the dynamic pages. With links pointing to dynamic pages the search engines would index those dynamic pages too. Optimizing dynamic pages is little tricky, but you can have your dynamic pages rank well for various keywords with the help of Link Building techniques. A perfect match of Only Incoming Links and keywords in the Anchor Text can do wonders to boost the organic ranking of the dynamic pages in your site.

6. Wider Search Engine Coverage

Link Building gives your website wider search engine coverage. In many Search engines you might have not submitted your website, but in due course of time, the search engines will identify and pick up links to your website from other websites they recognize and index your site.

This includes some important paid search engines (such as MSN, Ask) that you may not have submitted your website to them. All search engines do not list your website for free, but would pick a link to your website from other websites they recognise, and eventually list your website in their result pages.

7. Leading Competition

Link Building would also mean that your website stays ahead of your competition for your targeted keywords. More the number of Only Incoming Links pointing to your web pages, higher it gets ranked in the search engine results pages. Using your targeted keyword phrases in the links text would ensure a good ranking for your targeted keywords in the SERPs.

In our next article, I’ll discuss the importance of the anchor text itself in more detail.

DM