External Backlinks
Search engine algorithm identifies the value of links to determine the popularity, importance and relevance of a web page. Search engines like Google classify links into two categories: internal and external links. When it comes to the value between these two links, Google puts more weight and consideration to external links than internal links. Although internal links are still important, Google carries out the principle that what others say or think about you is more significant than what you say about yourself. But this doesn’t entail that you can ignore having good internal link structure or disregard improving on your internal links.

Advantages of Backlinks
Definitely, a direct advantage for having a huge number of external incoming links pointing to your site is that the more sites linking to your pages, the more online traffic your site will get and the wider the target audience your site attracts. Link building would be even more effective if backlinks are located in sites that attract high traffic themselves, have high quality content, and are within your industry or niche.

Another advantage of having a high level of backlinks, albeit less noticeable, is that it makes your site more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines. Search engine algorithms regard inbound links as votes of confidence. This means racking up more links increases the level of trust and power behind your site. Trust is an essential force behind any website’s successful search marketing efforts. Building trust with search engines is very important if you are competing for rankings and establishing dominant online presence in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. However, you can only accomplish this if you carefully select the right kind of quality links.

The Right Kind of Links
Always remember that a search engine’s algorithm can discriminate among the links leading to your site. There are good quality links that can greatly contribute to your link building efforts, and there are also bad ones. To become effective in driving more traffic to your site, you have to discern which backlinks can give your site the leverage to rank better in search engines. So how do you determine which links are worth pursing? How can you judge the value of a link?

Link Popularity, Relevance, and Trust
Having valuable backlinks helps your search engine optimization process to progress smoothly because it provides your site the sure-fire path to better ranking opportunities in search engine results pages. A valuable backlink that helps your site climb the SERPs must have high quality. Moreover, gathering high quality links will depend on the level of trust and relevance of the web sites they are found and on the popularity of your links.

Search engines have just recently placed more significance on metrics about an entire domain rather than an individual URL or page, making it now possible for new pages or even sites with very few links to rank highly because they are connected with important, trusted and well-linked-to domains. Based from this, you can see how being linked with certain domains will surely propel you own site to higher rankings. Having backlinks from other domains that have high levels of authority and trust signals search engines that your site is considered a potentially important resource of those trusted sites. Your site will be seen as valuable if your site have links from other valuable sites. Also, attracting links from websites that have content relevant to yours cues search engines to consider your site an influence within your niche or industry, pushing you further to higher rankings.

Link popularity also plays a vital role in boosting your rankings. Basically, if the links to your pages are considered popular and attract a lot of clicks, it also means that your site is considered popular and important by search engines

Anchor Text Relevance
As mentioned earlier, when looking for sites that will link to yours, it is always important to check their relevance to your content. Make sure that the page that links to your site is relevant to the page within your site that you want to link it to. See to it if the other page’s content is related to the keywords in your own target page, especially if that other page uses related keywords in locations that Google finds important. Check for keywords in the following locations of the page that can be accessed through the View Source command: domain and URL, title tag, heading tags, the body of the text and HTML, and the incoming links pointing to the page itself.

Your goal is to check if the page can be considered as relevant by search engine and if it also related to your own page. The relevance of the anchor text is one of the most important elements in determining rankings. As an attribute of links, anchor text is a critical metric that passes ranking value to a page. Furthermore, search engines give more ranking value that can be passed to “exact match” anchor texts rather than target keywords that are just inserted in an anchor text phrase. For instance, if your page contains a comprehensive article on how to maintain cars, and you are planning to get inbound links from a web site selling car care products, you need to check if the page has exact related anchor texts such as “car maintenance,” “maintaining your car,” etc., rather than “These cheap car care products will help maintain your car well.”

Link Juice, Link Equity, and PageRank
In your link building efforts, it is also important to look at link equity and link authority or “link juice.” Link equity is a component of PageRank, which is an important part of off-page search engine optimization. Link equity refers to the number of incoming links to any given page on your web site. On the other hand, link juice or link authority is the underlying value of the links. This is also referred to as domain authority, which describes the measure of importance, popularity, and trustworthiness of any page in a given domain by the search engines. Google considers the domain where you earn your links from as important as the individual metrics of the page passing the link.

These two combined influence PageRank, which is not directly related to how high you’ll rank in search engines. PageRank is a measure of a website’s popularity on a scale of 1 to 10, with PR 10 being the highest. PageRank functions under the principle that a link pointing to a web site is considered as vote or endorsement for that site. The more votes your site gets, especially from sites that have high PageRanks themselves, the higher your PageRank and popularity. To determine the PageRank value that is being passed, you have to identify the innate PageRank value of a page and the number of links on a page. If a page has a PageRank of 8 it can pass on and link out to two other pages, those pages will carry PR4 each. Thus, the more links on a page, the lower the PageRank value it can pass on.

Therefore, to make your site popular, you need to earn as much links as possible from other web sites that have substantial link authority, with sizeable inherent PageRank value, and have pages with less links to maximize the level of popularity and trust your site can gain.

Permanence
It goes without saying that the permanence and sustainability of links also play key roles to your search engine optimization process. Link building is not just a matter of immediate boosts in your page attributes or site popularity; it should also be in line with the long-term sustainability of these effects. The quality of the site where your links are earned from should not only be the focus, but also consider if those links will stay there for a long time. Once your links are gone, the effects are gone as well. It is important to pursue links from a site that’s just longer periods of time as the site and link mature.

Also, try to avoid buying links most of the time since you can only buy them out for a definite period of time. It won’t be worth it since you will just spend more money to renew and maintain your links on a site.

Link Positioning
Links can appear in different locations on a page; it can be on the header, footer, sidebars or in the body of the content itself. However, when search engines analyze a page for different sections, they assign different weights to content or links according to their location. In general, links placed at the top or beginning of the page are deemed more valuable by search engines than links on the footer of the page. Moreover, links that are occur naturally within the main content of the page carries higher value than any location. This means that links placed in articles as anchor texts that lead to your page have more weight than links placed at the end of a featured content. Thus, it is important to place your links at the top/ navigation header of the page or within a paragraph of the main content as much as possible.

Other Link Evaluation Factors to Consider
Finally, you should also take into account the cost of acquiring a link and the probability of acquiring a link. Issues like how much time and effort do you need to spend to earn a certain link must be thought through to become more effective and efficient in your SEO efforts. You should ask yourself: Is it worth it?

Also, you need to be realistic about the likelihood of acquiring a link from a web site. There are other factors that influence the possibility of actually earning a link. Do you have what it takes to earn a certain link? Can you add a link directly or submit it without strings attached? Can you easily make revisions or additions to a linking page? Also, do you have an existing relationship with the owner or webmaster of a certain domain? If you do, it would help a lot.

• What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or URL. They are often used interchangeably with inbound links, incoming links, inward links, and inlinks. In the world of SEO, backlinks, like PageRank, are an indicator of link popularity or importance of a particular web page. The weight that search engines like Google ascribe to quality backlinks when calculating SERP have made backlinks a building block for excellent SEO. Search engines consider pages with a substantial number of quality backlinks more relevant or more important than others when coming up with SERP. Link building is a vital tool that gives Internet businesses direct traffic, better position in the search engine rankings, and more profits. For any link building campaign to prevail and reap these benefits, webmasters or site owners need not rely on merely the quantity of backlinks pointing to their site, but the quality of backlinks as well. The usage of proper search engine optimization techniques and link building methods should take these facts into consideration.

• Quality Matters.

In getting inbound links for link popularity, quality matters. Search engines like Google compute the relevancy of a site based on the importance or relevancy of the backlinks pointing to that site. It is not enough to get as many inbound links as possible; we need to look at the quality of these backlinks. Quality is usually determined by the content of a specific site. When backlinks to your site come from other sites that have related content to your site, these backlinks are judged as relevant by the search engines. However, if these backlinks are from sites with unrelated content, search engines consider them less relevant. The more relevant the backlinks are to your site, the greater their quality. Moreover, there are several factors that influence a backlink’s value. When backlinks come from “high authority” sites, they are highly valuable.

• Importance of Anchor Text

One thing you need to consider in back link building is the anchor text of your backlinks. An anchor text is a description of the inbound link and must contain useful information relevant to the content on the linked page. There are tools like search engine bots that evaluates the relevancy of an anchor text to the content of a given web site. The bottom line is for the anchor text and content to be highly congruent. This will ensure that your web page becomes highly weighted in the SERP rankings based on a given keyword query.

• PageRank and Backlinks

Backlinks are important when we deal with how to increase our performance in Google PageRank. SEOWatch conducted a study to determine exactly how important backlinks are when computing PageRank. They conclude that 67% of PageRank depends on backlinks. This tells us that serious link building efforts require a lot of investment in order to enhance the quantity as well as quality of backlinks to a website. There are several techniques in building backlinks – some are considered ethical, and some unethical.

• Get Them Naturally.

When we say ethical methods in link building, we mean that the link acquisitions are made naturally. Increasing awareness on how search engines operate has resulted to the increasing use of sneaky and manipulative designs by webmasters in order to influence their placements in the search engine rankings. Since search engine algorithms are designed to assign rankings in a democratic manner, tougher measures and quality requirements have been imposed to prevent other webmasters from using unethical methods to gain undue advantage over others. Using sneaky devices like link farms do not only get you penalized, they might get you banned entirely. Search engines look for natural inbound links, which are links that are built slowly over time. There are several techniques to build natural links. Link baiting and using high quality content in order to attract natural links your way are among the most effective ways to improve a site’s link popularity. Site owners can develop natural links by themselves or can hire a link building company to do it for them.

• Backlink Building Don’ts

There are several link building practices to avoid.

1. Link exchange. One of the don’ts in link building is link exchange. This operates as a barter exchange of links. If you put a link to their site, they put a backlink to your site. When involved in link exchanges, you must be wary of the ratio of your outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links outnumber your inbound links, this is a negative sign. Moreover, you must ensure that your link exchange partners are not link farms; if so, you may put your site at risk of being banned from search engines.
2. Suspicious links. Never link to suspicious sites. While search engines do not penalize you for having backlinks from such sites, engaging in a link exchange program with so-called “bad neighborhood” sites would destroy your link building efforts.
3. Acquiring quality backlinks are an important factor to consider in any link building campaign geared at improving search engine rankings and enhancing link popularity. However, it takes more than just backlinks to drive traffic to your site and influence your rankings. The most important thing is to develop a website with high quality content that is useful and relevant to the end user experience.

If you pursue high quality link building using other methods and increase inflow of backlinks by submitting your URL effectively to Internet directories, the greater your change in breezing ahead of your competitors. The successful use of directory submission to boost link popularity and rankings depends on the number and quality of directories you submit your website to. The importance of “quality” in directory submissions, as in other link building methods cannot be overemphasized. Algorithms in Google and other major search engines favor sites listed in high quality directories.

Are Free Directories Worth It? There are thousands of possible directories that you could submit your website to for your link building campaign, but screening out thousands into a group of high quality directories will take time. When time is an issue for you, you can hire a link building company to handle directory submissions for you. High authority directories are the most popular go-to directories for site owners who are gunning for top spots in the SERP rankings. An important option you need to consider if you intend to submit a URL to an Internet directory for enhanced link popularity is The Open Directory Project at DMOZ.org. The Open Directory Project feeds content to search engines like Google, Lycos, Hotbot, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves and Netscape, among others.

Listing your site at DMOZ is helpful to your link building campaign since this allows your information to be found on several smaller search engines and directories on the Web. Moreover, DMOZ is considered to be among the free higher authority directories that are guaranteed to build link popularity. The downside with DMOZ however, is that its free listing feature subjects sites to very strict quality control procedures before submissions are accepted. Hence, acceptance is not easy and turnaround takes a considerable amount of time. Despite this, site owners must consider submitting to DMOZ and other free quality directories for link building. They must also submit to paid directories listings for site inclusion.

Paid Directories Why do you need to pay fees to be included in the directory listing? According to Matt Cutts of Google, the purpose of the fee in a high quality directory is to compensate the time and effort of someone (an editor) doing a genuine evaluation of a URL or site. There have been concerns that Google’s rejection policy of URLs with paid links would render listing into paid directories useless in link building efforts, but Cutts has explained it clearly that Google does not penalize directories requiring minimum fees for editorial reviews. What Google blacklists are directories that sell links for link juice, passing PR and purely for profit with no regard for the end user. If used effectively, directory submissions as a link building method guarantees a high return on investment (ROI).

By increasing the number of backlinks to your site, directory submissions help you gain link popularity and a better placement on the SERP rankings. Directory submissions are a long-term advertising technique that can directly send customers at your doorstep. Since it acts like an online phonebook of sites, having your site listed in many quality directories means a greater likelihood for prospective customers to view your site and obtain contact information. In the group of paid Internet directories, there are major differences in payment options. Some charge a lifetime or one-time fee and others charge an annual or recurring fee. Depending on your ROI goals, you need to evaluate the payment guidelines and review payment options before selecting the directory to submit to. Here are definitions to guide you:

1. Paid web directories. These are Internet directories that charge site owners a fee for their site inclusion on the directory. They are also called premium, commercial, or pay-for directory listings. Among the high authority paid directories include Yahoo! Directory, Skaffe, Joeant, Abilogic, eLib, and BOTW Directory.
2. Annual fee web directories are directories that charge site owners an annual fee to get listed on the directory. They are also referred to as recurring fee, recurring membership listings, or recurring fees.
3. Permanent fee web directories require a one-time charge for directory listings. This means that you pay a lifetime fee for site inclusion.

There is some debate on which payment option is best. Some prefer the permanent fee listings since it is more economical, but others question the quality of services in one-time listings. Recurring or annual fees are usually paid in order to maintain directories. As submissions increase, the larger the directories become, so Internet directories deem it fitting to charge site owners to maintain the directories and pay for editorial costs to ensure effective and sustained indexing for Google rankings. The choice is entirely left on the discretion of the site owner. A rule of thumb: do not pay too much for submission to paid directories. Submit to free directories and suggest your site only to high quality paid directories that guarantee ROI.

Blogging works this way: you share your knowledge on a preferred niche or topic and readers can send you feedbacks through comments. Since content is something very valuable in the eyes of the search engine, high quality content and sound link building methods can propel your blog to the top of the rankings. Your blog’s popularity can be gauged by examining the number of subscribers on your RSS feed and the frequency of exchanges and comments that occur between you and your readers. You can hire a link building company to increase your blog’s rankings. There are several firms that offer professional link building services to assist you. However, there are also useful do-it-yourself tips to maximize your blog’s link popularity.

Below are a few tips on how to acquire free links that can help catapult your blog’s rankings to the top spot.

1. Add your URL to major search engine directories. Essentially, this means Google, Yahoo, and MSN. All you have to do is visit Google Webmaster tools, login, add your site, and make sure to verify it. After verification, it takes about a week for Google to crawl your site. As for Yahoo, aside from adding your site, you will also need to authenticate it. Authentication takes around one or two days and it will entail about a week for Yahoo to crawl your web site. The same goes for MSN. Go to MSN Webmaster, login, add your site and upload the XML file provided to you by MSN on your site for verification.
2. Submit your URL to directory listings. Submitting your site to web directories will help you get free back links that will increase your search engine ranking. The trick is to choose the best free web directories to submit your URL to. Identify all possible web directories for submission but be picky. Search engines are rumored to blacklist some directory submissions for abusive behavior so it is best to do a little research on prospective web directories. Go to the site of each listed directory and review their submission rules and privacy guidelines. Avoid a directory submission service because you might not have control on the submission, you face the threat of being labeled a spammer, or your blog or site could get blacklisted.
3. Do some link swapping. Link swapping is a great way to build link popularity since it allows you to connect with the community of bloggers. It enables you to trade links with bloggers who share similar interests with you. In the end, link swapping generates more readership, more traffic, and consequently, link popularity to your site. Examples of sites that facilitate link swapping among bloggers are BlogLinker and Link2Blogs.
4. Button exchanges. A button exchange is a network where member sites display button ads and getting ads in return, which are displayed on other web sites. All you have to do is submit an 88 x 31 button and put the network’s code on your web site. In doing so, other participating sites will display your 88 x 31 button on their sites. This could hopefully increase your chance of getting people to click your site once they see your button, generate traffic, and build link popularity.
5. Traffic exchanges. A traffic exchange is a service where you can sign up to generate traffic to your blog or site and boost link popularity. It works like this: you get to view other people’s web pages in exchange for having your own pages viewed by others. If you view another member’s web page for a certain period of time, your credit balance increases. If a member views your web page for the same amount of time, your credit balance increases. Consequently, the more you surf the Internet and view other people’s web pages, the greater your chances of your site getting more hits and views, increasing link popularity. There are two types of traffic exchanges – manual and auto. A manual exchange involves a human being viewing web pages, whereas an auto exchange can run in your web browser and automatically refresh to a new web page.

When trying out these tips, always bear in mind that link building is a process that will necessarily take time. Therefore, patience is a virtue when it comes to building link popularity. In addition to the advice mentioned above, you should always educate yourself on the newest and most effective link building methods that you could use in order to get your blog noticed on the Internet.