Daniel Coburn

One very important thing about building links externally is to make sure you do not link spam.  What is link spam?  That’s when you post links to your site for the sole purpose of gaining a link in a post, comment etc.  While many of the blog’s out there now have rel=”nofollow” standard with all links there are still people that feel the need to spam it.  If you are going to go to a blog, or a forum try to make sure you add value.  First it gives people a reason why they might actually want to follow your link to see what you have to say.  So become a part of the community and not a spammer in the community.  It will give you credibility and a good chance of getting people to link to you because of the benefit you have shown them as an active part of the community.

You build good internal links to push your pagerank around, now you need to focus on building up your Internet reputation. How do you do this? How does Google say who’s important? Short answer it’s a popularity contest! Longer answer: It’s a popularity contest amongst peers.

So when you build links it’s important to build them from pages that make sense to be pointed too you.  So if you are a dog site, links from computer sites don’t help you too much.  So you need to find good sites that are in your niche and get links from them, also bigger sites with links into you are also helpful.  Now on those links if you are able to control the text that’s in the href use keywords that are important to you.  So instead of having <a hfref=”http://www.site.com”>site.com</a> do something like <a href=”http://www.site.com”>keyword</a>.

Also you should try to get your site into DMOZ and if you can afford it get it in Yahoo! directory.

As we mentioned your links need to look like they make sense or they won’t pass PR to you and could actually hurt you if the search engine see’s that you have a ton of unrelated links you will lose authority amongst your friends and will lose rankings.

So just make sure the links make sense to users and they’ll make sense to the engines.