SEO - The Importance of Building Good Quality Links

When creating your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, the critical factors you always need to consider are:

· carefully considering and placing your keywords; and

· carefully considering and placing the links pointing to your site.

This article discusses the importance link building in your SEO strategy and provides some useful suggestions as well as some things to avoid if you want your SEO project to be successful.

What are backlinks and why are they important for SEO?

Backlinks are links that point to your site from another website.

For those of us in the SEO world, we know that the number, variety and quality of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of a website. Outside SEO, backlinks may be of a personal interest because they indicate who is paying attention to a website and thus, is probably going to link to it.

Links are a bit like a "vote of confidence" or a "recommendation" from another website, meaning that your website is seen by many as more relevant than your competitors.

Carrying out link building encourages search engines to take a look at your website and, if they see that it is a popular one, they will automatically start to rank it higher.

What are the boundaries of a good backlink and a bad backlink?

Backlinks are generally of 3 types:

The best backlinks are called " RELATED" links, because they link to relevant websites. The next tier of backlinks are called " RELEVANT" links, which should link to websites that complement or actually compliment the website they are pointing to. Lastly, there are "NO NO" links, which mean to go against the flow and idelines of the search engines.

It is recommended that you use the Google toolbar to evaluation all of your backlinks, showing you the number of websites that are linking to your website. If you find a lot, then you should try to streamline the link so as to obtain the maximum value for your efforts.

You should be careful when purchasing backlinks because many of them are of poor quality and directing people to link farms, which will instead cause your website to be penalised.

How to Get Good Backlinks

When it comes to getting links, you should always be creative and look for natural or organic ways of getting them. A number of link building services exist; they basically provide you with tools and advice on how to get backlinks.

When using the tools and advice to get backlinks, you should look at the kind of sites the services are linking to. If the sites are highly reputable, then you can bet that the links are worth trading.

You should also try to link from the sites that are highly relevant to your own site's content. In other words, you should link to other websites that complement your website, rather than websites with a completely different focus.

Below are some of the link building strategies that you can follow:

Write and submit original articles. Posting and submitting original articles can bring Rewrite visitors to your website. If you can write a few new posts or some rewritten articles, then you can expect to be Rewrite by several dozen people. Several links always works better than several links only.

Post on forums regularly. By day, on forums, you will see many active users and regular topics being had with lots of useful discussions taking place over there. If you can post well on forums, be sure that your post will reach more people. In forums, you can easily discuss the problems of your site, your suggestions and eventually, your solutions.

Helpful tools. Apart from various programs and tools that I have listed down below, there are several useful programs and tools that you can find over the inteet. Some of them even have good products and services to offer.

When it comes to link building, you should not be focused on getting hundreds of links, but should rather focus on getting a few quality links. Remember that with quality links, you get to enjoy higher search engine page ranking.

Reciprocal Links FromSimilar Sites. Exchanging links with sites that are similar to your websites are great ways to build links. Since these sites are similar to yours, you can expect that they will also rank high on search engines.

Submit Your Site To Directories. Submitting your site to web directories is probably the easiest way to get your first incoming links. Most directories are free to submit to and only ask for your site's URL.

Join Related Inteet Forums. Some forums that are related to your niche allow you to posts links in your account and thus, this will help improve your SEO.

Submit A Blog. A blog is a great way to regularly provide new content on your website.