by Matt Jackson, 11/21/2006
Fighting On An Even Battlefield
Page content is important. Gaining a link from a page that is based on a topic irrelevant to your own is near useless. Even ensuring that the text immediately surrounding your link and the anchor text are relevant does not offer what I look for in a linking page. I want complete (or as near as possible to complete) relevancy.
Don't Camouflage Your Links
Control over anchor text is vital. The anchor text of a link is the visual element that readers can see, it's the section of the HTML that is viewed and clicked by readers, and it is the section of a link that many inexperienced promoters get completely wrong. When you start a link building or article submission campaign it is important to determine the keywords you will be targeting and include these keywords in the hypertext of the link and preferably at least once or twice in the article itself. Most article directories allow for two links so use them both for different keywords, preferably pointing to different pages of your site.
Always Be Planning Your Next Inbound Link Campaign
The final factor regarding linking that is vitally important is that you keep going. Even when you reach the top spots for your most competitive keywords you have to keep plugging away. The second you let it drop you can guarantee that another site with another eager Webmaster at the helm is chomping at the bit ready to take over the mantle of Google number one.
Only Fools Rush In
New websites should always take care not to build too many links too quickly. Google do see this as meaning you employ an underhand method of link building because new sites typically cannot muster up thousands of links in their first few days. Take your time, submit one article to several directories, and then wait to be indexed. Using this technique you will get indexed relatively quickly and after a couple of weeks you can start to post articles with a little more regularity.
Conclusion And A Little Ambush Prevention
Inbound linking is potentially (I use that word only to try and prevent the ambush of criticism from others) the most important aspect of Google SEO. A good link profile with a reasonable number of inbound links from high quality, and relevant websites can make up for under optimized or even un-optimized website content. What it can't make up for is the use of other blackhat SEO techniques. Do everything above board and it is less likely that you will become one of the anti-Google druids; those that spend the rest of their online life frequenting message boards and blogs relaying the tired tale of how they were once an online millionaire before Google destroyed them.
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About the author
Matt Jackson is the website content copywriter for WebWiseWords. As well as providing insightful tales of epic optimization battles he also offers his unique link building service to anyone that is even remotely interested and several who aren't.