If you have a website and have been looking into SEO then you will know it is absolutely vital to build links to your website. There are a lot of different ways to build links to your website and the aim of this article is to consider the main things you should be looking for as well as the best places to get links.

What Should You Look For from Your Links

This seems like an odd thing to consider but there is different quality of links and so you should be looking for the best quality you can get. You will quite quickly find out that the better quality your links the less you will need to get to the top of the search engines. Below is our list of the main things you should be looking for:

1. High PageRank

PageRank is a measure that Google gives to websites and it is a bit like a quality stamp. The higher your PageRank the more of an authority you are and the more valuable a link from you is. All websites will be given a PageRank between 0 and 10 with 10 being the best. The more links you can get from sites with a high PageRank the better your chance of ranking higher.

2. Ability to add Anchor Text

The anchor text on your link is basically the text that people will have to click to find your website. You should look for websites where you can decide what text you have so that you can include your keywords. We have found that be effectively using anchor text we can get our website to rank higher in the search engine results then websites that have a lot more links then we do.

3. Avoid No Follow Links

In the UK we all know that Google is by far and away the most popular search engine, accounting for about 80% of all searches. One of the things that Google has implemented is the No Follow tag which can be added to links and Google will then not follow or index that link. This is important because most blogs will use this for people who make posts and so you could spend a lot of time making blog posts and these will not affect your ranking. However they can still be valuable as you will be able to build a profile and a reputation on the blogs but this will not affect your search engine ranking.

The Best Place to Obtain Links

There are a lot of places to obtain links and we cannot cover them all in this article. However below we have put our 3 favourite ways of getting links to your website:

1. Article Writing

This is a great way to get links as you can determine the text of your link. Also if you write an article a week you will be able to submit it to over 100 directories, each with a link to your website. This will not only help your position on the search engines but it will also see you getting traffic that has been referred to you from the article itself. We would also recommend adding these articles to your own website in order to build your number of pages which is vital for SEO.

2. Directory Submissions

There are literally 1,000's of free internet directories out there and they will all accept your website. Again with most of these sites you get a link using your chose anchor text. It can be very time consuming submitting your site to these but it is worth it in the long run as they will also bring extra traffic to your website. It is important to remember that it can take several weeks for your website to be accepted on these directories and so it is not going to build your link profile quickly.

3. Forum Posting

Get involved in your industry community. Read the Forums and answer questions the best that you can giving as much advice as possible. Then when you can include a link to your website. You can often choose anchor text and you are like to generate a lot of traffic from the forum. In addition, if it is a popular forum it is possible your post will rank highly in the search engines which again will help to bring people to your site.

It is important to remember that internet marketing is not about search engine rankings alone but is about traffic generation and bringing as many people to your site as possible.