Like anything worth doing right, building links to your website pays off with consistent effort. If you take the time, your link building efforts will solidify your search engine positions.

As a webmaster, if you understand linking, then you understand what can help you better search engine rankings. But, more than just understanding linking, you must move beyond the theoretical and actually start building links.

When you understand why links are important and you begin to implement a solid linking strategy, then you need to understand why linking is an ongoing process. Time and again I get clients who lack the understanding that link building isn’t just a “one month and you’re done” process.

Search engines love new content. When you write an article about your website or your service or product, you’re giving the search engines what they want; fresh, new content.

However, because everyone else is also feeding the search engines new content, news and information tends to get stale quickly.

You can compare your linking strategy to a person climbing stairs with a yo-yo. The stairs are equivalent to your long-term linking activities. The yo-yo represents the ebb and flow of traffic and links to your site. So, the general direction of your linking activities should be pointing up. That is, you have to continue “the climb”.

You’ll notice that, as you increase your activity, your traffic will increase as will your search engine rankings. This represents the yo-yo on its way up. Then, after the initial surge, traffic will tend to die down. That’s the yo-yo at the bottom of its swing. When you take another step (i.e. submit more articles, submit to more link directories, and post to your blog) your traffic will increase. This represents the yo-yo coming back up from the swing.

On the other hand, if your linking process stalls or if you completely stop altogether, it’s the equivalent of someone walking downstairs but this time there’s less movement in the yo-yo. You’ll see a steady decline in traffic as well as links because your once fresh content is old.

The great news is that most webmasters don’t fully understand how linking gets them ranked and, more importantly, how on ongoing linking process is the key to achieving higher rankings in the search engines. Why is this great news? Because you can take advantage of it! Most webmasters only have a few dozen links.

Why do you think there are so many “push button” linking software packages on the market? We want all the reward with little to no effort.

Linking is very simple. You don’t need super technical knowledge to understand how it works. You just have to put in the time required to get and maintain the links. When you truly understand this, then you’ll put in the work required to do a good job.

So, whether you implement a linking strategy your self or outsource the job to someone else, it’s critical that you maintain momentum. It takes time, but you will be rewarded for staying diligent.

The Internet is vast and there are billions of webpages out there all needing to be indexed by major search engines such as Yahoo, Google and MSN. Not all of these pages have yet been indexed. It takes time for search engines to crawl new pages. For instance, Google typically crawls certain websites less once it knows that these sites don’t regularly update their content.

Other reasons for pages not being indexed is that the owner of a site didn’t properly link certain pages. These ‘orphan’ pages which are not correctly linked from the rest of the main website may not be indexed by search engines. Another possibility could be that a website or domain is too new and hasn’t yet been indexed.

Unfortunately for you, some of these un-indexed webpages could have links pointing to your website. You are losing valuable inbound links because search engines such as Google don’t know these webpages exist. One of the key elements in ranking higher on Google is inbound links. The importance of such links cannot be stressed enough.

One way inbound links instead of reciprocal links work the best for Google. Google keeps changing it’s algorithm and in it’s last update tried to filter out sites with excessive reciprocal links. A reciprocal link is one in which you link to a website and that website links back to you. Google rightly or wrongly believes that reciprocal links may be manipulated to generate more inbound links. Emphasis is placed on one-way links. Sometimes you may arrange a link trade where Website A links to Website B. The owner of website B also owns Website C and uses Website C to link back to Website A. However, this attempt to trick Google may not work.

Most of us who work in or are familiar with the search engine optimization field know that inbound links are the key to ranking high on Google. Especially one-way links. The trick is to get these inbound links. Traditional methods of obtaining one-way links by leaving your website URL in a comment on blogs is dying as blogs increasingly use the “nofollow” tag in their A HREF statement. The “nofollow” tag tells search engines to not follow the link or count the link to another website.

One of the simplest ways to get links is to tell Google about third party sites which already link to you. Many of these webpages which link to your website haven’t yet been indexed by Google. These are wasted links as Google doesn’t know that they exist. The good news is that you have the ability to let Google know about these links.

1. Start by examining your web logs to check for referrers. Then save this file containing your referrers into a text document. Use a text editor of your choice to filter this referrer file and remove any hits from search engines.

2. Next filter out any referrer webpages which have already been indexed by Google. This second step can be time consuming and a tedious task so it can be skipped if you choose.

3. Use an html editor to make proper URLs from this list of referrers. Make hot-links of all the URLs.

4. Save the document as an html page and place this document on your website or blog. Be sure not to include more than 90 links per page. If you have more thank 90 referrer links then split the links into multiple pages, each page containing no more than 90 links.

5. Place hot links from your website, blog or other websites which you control to the webpage containing this list of referrers. If you’ve created more than one list of referrers then be sure to link to these additional pages as well. It’s a good idea to cross-link your multiple referrer pages.

6. The last step is to wait for Google’s bot to come and index your new referrer webpage. Google will follow the hot-links from your webpage to your list of referrer’s and index these webpages that have not yet been indexed. You’re directly helping your own website by telling Google of important inbound links. You’re also helping your referrers by linking their webpage. You will be leaking PR from your webpage. That’s why it’s important to create new referrer webpage containing a listing of your inbound links.

Read more SEO tips at Webmaster Revenue Programs.

It is one of the most common acknowledgements in search engine optimisation that the quality, theme, anchor text used, and volume of links that point to your website helps improve your search engine rankings, through increased link popularity.

However within the past few weeks Matt Cutts seems to have turned the SEO world on its head by strongly suggesting that Google intend to set-up a ‘Snitch on a link selling website’ service that allows people to hand over details of websites they know are selling links from their site.

I’d just like to offer my opinion on this as I think it’s a diabolical, un-workable idea that oozes hidden agendas:

1) If a site is reported, how can you prove it? – So you’ve reported a site you are convinced are selling links to Google, what next? To be able to track and prove a website is selling links they either have to be very stupid (advertising ‘buy a link on our site!’) or Google have to have a paper trail back to the money, after all, how else would they be able to prove the allegation was correct?

2) Lets all report our competitors! – So is it innocent till proven guilty or guilty till proven innocent with this proposed scheme? I believe there will be a great deal of complaints made directly by competitors in order to get other website owners into strife. Maybe they’ve got higher ranking placements? Maybe they stole your best customer? Maybe you just want to get some companies out the way to generate more business yourself? I don’t understand how Google can accurately identify the agenda and motive behind the person reporting the site selling links, so similar to point 1, how do you decide who is telling the truth?

3) How do you tell a paid link from a non-paid link? – As far as I’m aware Google haven’t yet become powerful enough to indict individuals and businesses and legally demand bank records so unless you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar (e.g. you send out advertising costs for text links to a Google private investigator) then I fail to see how you can tell what link has been paid for and what was just someone linking out to a site they genuinely respect?

4) Google Adsense – Google Adsense is a bunch of text link adverts people splash all over their websites to make a couple of cents or pence from Google’s advertising network. People pay for the privilege of having their website listing appear on the Adsense network, effectively a form of text link advertising, so there will be inevitable cries of “Hypocrisy” if this proposal goes ahead

5) There are genuine reasons for buying a link – This isn’t always SEO related, sometimes people buy links on websites because they are popular sites with a relevant target audience to the person buying the link and hence they will get direct traffic from this form of advertising while not necessarily even considering the benefits in terms of improve link popularity. After all, a banner with a direct hyperlink is still a link isn’t it? Are these to be punished to? Or ignored because there is no keyword-rich anchor text at play?

6) Google created this in the first place – The guys at Google have to accept that an entire new generation of SEO tactics and techniques only occur because online marketers are obliged to get high ranking placements within the Google engine because it’s the most popular by a country mile. If link popularity was never a factor then buying links would never have become a necessity so in that respect Google created this situation, so again, there may well be calls of hypocrisy, as Google appear more than happy with the forms of revenue generated through SEO such as pay per click advertising campaigns

Other factors you have to consider are:

- What will the punishment be? How will this be implemented? Will sites get black listed? If so, when you stop selling links are you back in? Will that site owner then go underground and start up selling links on another site now understanding what they can get away with and how they can get around it?

- Will sites buying links be penalised? So will the penalty chain be passed down? If so, will people start buying links and pointing them at their competitors’ websites to get them penalised? Any time a site is penalised for something ‘off-page’ it is a very dangerous precedent because it may not be something you actually did but something someone else did to you get penalised

I firmly believe this is scaremongering by the Google team, they are trying to think of ways to eliminate a form of online marketing that exists 99% because of their engine’s popularity but they aren’t seeing a dollar from in terms of income.

If they do follow down this route I believe it is a continuation of their attempts to render the natural search listings obsolete and push the prominence of pay per click even more than they currently do.

I’m hoping they see sense, I’ve never heard of anyone complaining about anyone else selling links other than through annoyance because their site isn’t as valuable as their competitors so they’re not making as much money if they sell links. I’m hoping that Matt Cutts is being used as a canvassing tool by Google and that the backlash of the SEO world has been sufficient for them to drop the idea, focus on being the best search tool, and let the marketers market.

It is well known that major search engines rank your website based on the quantity and quality of links that are pointing to your site. Webmasters use various methods to increase their website’s link popularity.

One of them is using text links ads. These are ads that are very similar to newspaper’s ads, without graphics. You just write a headline with a short description and include the link to your website. Visitors clicking on them are directly sent to your site. And obviously, the search engine spiders visiting those websites follow your link. And because these are one-way links (also called “backlinks”), they have a higher weight in the search engines’s algorithms which determine your website’s ranking.

The most important part of this method is to choose the website where you put your link. For obvious reasons, most webmasters prefer to place their links on highly ranked websites or directories. The higher the Pagerank of the website offering you a one-way link, the better for you. In fact, the most effective quality links are those placed on PR5 websites or higher such as asondheim, which offers also search engine friendly listings with deep links to many pages of the same domain.

Some webmasters buy text links at a monthly basis, what the advertisers call ‘recurring billing’. You place your inbound link on a high ranked website and you pay an agreed fee every month. This method has the disadvantage of tying you up for long i.e. if you don’t pay your monthly bill, your link will be removed and you’ll no longer have the benefit you were looking for in the first place: having a quality link pointing to your website from a high ranked website.

But there is nowadays another interesting alternative: some text links directories offer the possibility of placing your link with a one-off fee. You then have a permanent link to your website. No recurring billing! No link removal! And the most exciting feature is that those one-off payments can costs as little as $1-$5. This is a cheap and highly cost-effective method of increasing your popularity. Usually, webmasters who want their website to appear at prominent places, such as the homepage or the top of a category page, have to bid more than the others. They decide what they want to pay in order to appear where they want. A fair enough system, in my opinion.

How to identify such websites? Do as I did. Use Google. You can make a search via Google, using keywords such as ‘buy cheap text links’ for example.

High quality sites that link to your website can give it more credibility, increase traffic and improve your search engine optimization efforts. So, how do you get sites to link to you?

Most people contact the sites they want to link with and ask them for a link. If the Webmaster ever gets back to them they will often decline. This is a slow laborious process at best. Although this manual method does work, there are much faster ways to quickly increase the number of sites linking to you.

None of the strategies I’m about to give you should be used to do anything that violates the search engine’s TOS or Terms of Service. An easy way to stay in the good graces of all of the search engines without having to memorize their mile long TOS is to create high quality sites that are relevant to the keywords you are targeting and don’t do anything deceptive. It’s really that simple.

So, the Goal is to get as many “quality” sites linking to you as possible. So, what makes a “quality” site? Google has a rating system called page rank or PR. It is a scale that measures the “quality” of a website between 0 and 10 with zero being that the worst and 10 being the best.

The exact method of how they do this is a trade secret but it is believed that they base the score off of the number of links to a particular site along with the quality of those sites linking to the particular website. So in other words, it’s better to have 100 sites with a 10 PR link to your site than 100 sites with a 1 PR.

So, that leads us to the million dollar question, what is better quantity or quality? The easy answer is both. You want to monitor the quality of links you are targeting but you don’t want to decline a link from someone just because they don’t have a PR 10.

The following are some of the fastest ways to build the number of inbound links to your site.

Articles

Webmasters are always hungry for fresh content for their websites and blogs. You can write articles that are related to your website or industry and post them on article directories. The article should contain a small bio about yourself with a link to your site. Webmasters then place your article on their sites and blogs on the condition that they leave your links in place. The best part is that most article directories are free.

Press Releases

There are online press release distribution services that will distribute your press release to thousands of online news outlets. All you have to do is create a press release that contains your important keywords along with links to your site and then submit it.

Once your press release is distributed, many of the sites who receive the release will appear as sites linking to your site.

Blogs

Be sure to include your link in your blog posts when relevant. Ask other bloggers to link to your site and reverence it. If you don’t have a blog you can get one. There are many free services.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) & Paid Links

An easy way to get links to your site is to pay for them. You can do this by purchasing a link for a set amount of time (day, week, month, etc.) or you can pay per click.

Link to Yourself

If you have multiple websites or domain names don’t forget to link the together. This is assuming that they are real sites and not just a bunch of UGS (Useless Gateway Sites) that you threw together.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs provide Webmasters with codes that they put on their website to track any sales that they refer. When a webmaster puts this code on their website it creates a link to the site they are promoting so as you are building your affiliate business you are also building your inbound links.

The above link building strategies are meant to give you a general overview. With a little well directed effort consistently applied, you will have an impressive number of sites linking to you in a very short time.

In general, there are 2 ways to get back links to your site. You can either buy them, or you can get them for free by submitting your site to web directories. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each approach.

1) Buying links.

Many internet marketers have resorted to buying links to get back links quickly. There are several types of link buying deals you can look into. You can buy monthly links, or you can buy permanent links. Monthly deals require you to pay a monthly fee for the one way link that you place on another website. This may range from $5 to $100 upwards, depending on the page rank of the website you are advertising on. When buying links, try to buy links that are embedded in the content. Avoid buying site wide links. Google may penalize your site if you get this wrong.

Permanent links sound like a better deal because you only have to pay once. But good permanent link deals are harder to come by. To find such deals on websites with high page rank is close to impossible.

2) Web directory submission.

Now that you are familiar with permanent links and monthly links, let’s discuss web directory submissions.

Web directories are websites that are setup to organize links so that visitors can find the websites that they are looking for easily. Remember Yahoo web directory? That is probably one of the first web directories that came online. It became hugely popular, and went on to become the giant Yahoo that we know today.

When you submit your links to web directories, you are actually acquiring one way permanent back links. But you can only achieve your goal if your links are approved by the directory owners. Some web directories are free, while others are paid. Usually, you may be asked to pay a small fee if the web directory has a high page rank. Stick to free web directories if budget is a concern.

On the Internet, there are literally thousands of web directories. Many of them allow submissions for free. Some may ask for a reciprocal back link, but many do not.

To accelerate the link building process, it is advisable to outsource all your web directory submissions activities to professional link building service providers. This will free up your time so you can focus on other aspects of your Internet business.

Since the price is often rather affordable, there is little reason not to outsource. Experienced submitters will be able to complete the work for you in a matter of hours.

SEO One-way Web Links

I’ve only seen five strategies that really work consistently for
getting hundreds of links.

Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies

Yet there’s perennial interest in alternative linking
strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much
potential as the five major ways of getting links.

Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass
themselves off as viral
marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme:
you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone
else, and on and on down the line. Link farms can get you
delisted from search engine indexes, so don’t even try them.

Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use
affiliate software that links directly to your site rather than
through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing
all their affiliate links in redirects of their own invention,
to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply
apply to the program themselves to get a discount.

Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way
inbound links, but they’ll only have search-engine value a small
percentage of the time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use
search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically
encase links in script, or use robot instructions to prevent
spiders from following links.

Many one-way inbound
linking strategies fall into the
great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as
winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website
just for being so great.

Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the
this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as
offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange
for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty
links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply
chain.)

Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of
one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all
have more potential than some of the more madcapped strategies.
Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to
understand all five strategies in order to really gain a
distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound
links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are
an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you
cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

Unfortunately, “eventually” can be a very long time.

Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can’t get search engine
traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet
without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone
going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links
if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website
you offer in exchange a link from another website you also
control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of
defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest.
If you have more than one website, you probably are already
employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

You need to have more than one website in the same general
category of interest or the links won’t be relevant.

The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify
compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated
to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.

As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is
that the links are mostly on “Resources” pages that are just
lists of links. There’s only a small chance of getting
significant traffic from these links. Plus, any “Resource” page
may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if
that hasn’t happened already.

3. Submitting to Directories

They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing,
no-fee-charging, and actually well-run directories of relevant
links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO acquaintance tells me
he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head. Plus, there
are other kinds of directories: directories of affiliate
programs, of websites using a certain content management system,
of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of
websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.

Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it’s a good
deal if you can get it. But let’s say you do get links from all
200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche
directories–now what?

4. Paying for Inbound Links

Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has
become big business. Buying good traffic-generating “clean”
links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising, which
confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of pitfalls of
relying primarily on paid links for SEO:

The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial
search engine traffic can become prohibitive.

As soon as you stop paying, you lose your link–you are
essentially renting rather than owning, with no “link equity”
building up.

Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links on
rankings, as revealed in various patent filings. A website can
try to mask the fact that the links are paid, but how well it
does that is out of your control.

Given Google’s mission to dampen paid links’ effectiveness, paid
link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential paid
link partner is “passing PageRank.” But identifying appropriate
PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in itself.

Google also has a stated mission of dampening the value of any
“artificial” links. Having most of your links on PageRank 3 or
higher web pages would seem to be a dead give-away that your
links are “artificial,” since the vast majority of web pages
(note: not necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1
or lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have so
little impact on a site’s PageRank that it would not be worth
the expense.

If you have a lot of adult links, you have to make the most out of them. If you already have an adult site, you have to consider the regular exchange of the links because this process can actually help you increase the traffic range of your site. Therefore, you have to provide yourself with an exchange program in order t earn some extra money from the people who are using your porn site. The link exchange sites are quite plentiful and you have to make the proper use of these existent adult resources in order to provide yourself with financial benefits. Not using the exchange resource may cost you a lot of time and money when it comes to developing your own adult business. Therefore, the only thing that you will have to do is to find these types of directories in order to use them. You will have to submit your URL to these sites and you will notice that the things will improve quite rapidly.

The porn links exchange can provide you with extra traffic and money too; more links are likely to come along with more traffic and this generated traffic may help you increase your business opportunities. You will be able to generate your own targeted traffic as soon as you start using the porn links exchange. Every web master is likely to be fully aware that traffic is the one that may generate extra money. You have to make the customers visit your site in order to buy and this feature has to be assured in order for you to be able to pay your bills.

But there are some differences between an ordinary site and a porn one; getting traffic for the porn sites is not similar with the process that is involved in the case of an ordinary site. Therefore, it is vital to submit your URL to the right exchange program in order to avoid possible scams. You have to use all the porn resources that you can get because this is the main option when it comes to generating the necessary and profitable traffic. The adult link exchange is to be used because this process can make able to face your constant competition and attract the future customers who are going to buy from your site. Many of these adult links exchange are free from any charge; this aspect is quite convenient when it comes to a new comer who does not have sufficient money in order to generate his own traffic by himself. For instance, you can choose a person who is running the same type of site in order to exchange links with him. This exchange can definitely make the difference for your site and you will be able to benefit from this constant exchange.

So, you will have to post other people’s links on your site and they will do the same move for you thus generating an increased future traffic; if one of the two sites is quite reputable, this feature will bring future improvements for both sides. The search engine rankings will be improved too and money can be earned thanks to this aspect. If you are not familiar with the way an adult links exchange works, you may pay attention to the following lines in order to understand the main process of this online exchange. Every site, including your adult side, is likely to be found through the existent search engine; these powerful engines are likely to use different computational algorithms that are able to calculate the efficiency of your future adult link exchange.

Therefore, you must choose the best link exchange site in order to achieve the results you are looking for. The other site has to have a similar content when compared with your adult site. Credence will be lent to both of the links thus making them stronger when it comes to the abilities of the search engine. You must also consider exchanging links with sites that have a very good page ranking. Therefore, you must not consider the number of the links you may generate; on the contrary, you should pay attention to their quality because this feature is likely to make the final difference. Every search engine will be looking for quality sites because this is all about the adult links exchange that is made in the proper manner.

But you also have to be fully aware that not all sites are good ones; you have to pay attention to the sites in order to choose the right one that is likely to make you earn some extra money. Only the reputable and good directories are to be used in order to perform the porn links exchange; otherwise, you may deal with future scams. You may also pay attention to the interface of every porn site in order to choose the quality sites that may provide you with valuable links.

Many ponder the question of how to get one way links pointing to their site, well one way to do this is by placing your links on web directories. In the technological world of websites, search engines and web directories have a long-standing relationship. Search engines look at directories and place a high value on them because they are human edited.

Did you know that a key factor in the ranking algorithm of search engines is link popularity? Spiders released by search engines will add your site to search engine indexes.

One link from a directory is counted as a back link and hence increases your link popularity. Before placing your link on a directory make sure the directory ranks well and is SEO friendly, which means that is optimized for each category this will increase the value of your posted link.

To start pulling in traffic a great strategy to use is to place links on web directories, this will build the one way links that you need. Posting links on web directories draws website users. Placing links on directories is a good strategy but if you are placing the links buy purchasing them it can become expensive.

Using reciprocal link exchange is a great strategy but should not be the only strategy you use, search engines give some weight to reciprocal link exchanges but one way links are looked upon as more important, try to have a diversified strategy when building you link campaign, don’t stick to one method.

Many webmasters feel they are able to receive traffic by listing their sites in web directories, so will even pay a fee to get their sites listed quickly and place the web directories link on their site to get listed.

There are many benefits associated with gaining free traffic from web directories. An economical way of building traffic is to place your links on free web directories. Basically web-hosting directories are of two types: paid WHDs and free WHDs.

You need to figure out if you should pay for a link on a web directory or not, a good rule of thumb is if the directory does not have higher than a 4 page rank don’t pay if the page rank is higher than a 4 then pay. The options are many and stem from two main categories: free directories and paid directories. Placing links on web directories is sometimes free and sometimes you need to pay for the links, usually the pay for directories are those directories that have a high page rank.

There are many free directories to submit your links to; one of the most important directories is dmoz.org. If you haven’t submitted your website(s) to this directory you must do so. Make sure you follow the guidelines when submitting to dmoz.org. The other free directories you can find by going to the search engines and doing a search under free link directories, once you have the list start submitting your site(s). Make sure you don’t reciprocate the link because this defeats the purpose of the one way link.

There are software programs that can help submit to these directories, the plus side to using the software is that they update them regularly with new directories and the list of directories is at your finger tips.

We’ve all heard the popular children’s playtime rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

While this may have been true in elementary school, it’s definitely not true in the search engine optimization (SEO) game. Why? Because as much we’d prefer not to believe it, search engine algorithms are evolving at an incredible rate, so much so that their ranking algorithms have grown sophisticated enough to evaluate web sites on on the basis of what sites they’re connected to.

There’s no doubt that link building is a critical component to successful search engine optimization. The reason link building is so important to achieving high organic positioning is that all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask) use link related variables in their ranking algorithms, the complex equations that evaluate a site on a myriad of factors and then use this data to determine which sites appear where on the results pages.

So what incoming link related variables do the search engine algorithms consider?

- Number of Links

- Links Must Present Value to Users

Yet not every link helps. In this article, I’m going to discuss some key concepts related to link building, but more importantly, where not to build links.

As you’ve read, links are an important aspect of SEO. But not just any link. In fact, the wrong links can hurt you, badly. Now, I’ll lay out some false link “opportunities” to avoid, in the process explaining why not every link is a good one, and how some can do far more harm than good.

With growth of search engines, “spamming” has become a serious issue. There are so called “Black Hat SEO” tactics, unfair and unethical methods used to achieve search engine results using certain techniques to influence search engine algorithms.

While the results of Black Hat SEO can be lucrative, eventually they most certainly will result in loss of ranking, or even a black listing of your site (when search engines permanently stop displaying your website in the results).

Now that you’re familiar with Black Hat SEO tactics, I’ll begin to explore what constitutes valued links in the eyes of the search engines.

But first and foremost, I’ll state the First Commandment of link building as passed down from the Pantheon of Search Gods: Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.

LINKS MUST PRESENT USERS WITH REAL, TANGIBLE VALUE.

This renders the defintion of a “valuable link” (one that boosts organic positioning) as a link that presents users with relevant information from reputable sources. The definition of the word “link” itself provides additional insight into the way these tools were intended to be used in an online atmosphere. A link is a connection that bonds two separate parts together to form a whole. Links can also be units in a communication system, and thus, should remain relevant, focused, and informational.

So what types of links should you avoid?

- Avoid Links Farms

- Never Pay For Links

This brings us to our first SEO no-no. Avoid link farms. These are sites which sell links, often to the tune of “100 links for $100″ or something like that. While they were popular in the 1990s before the search engines realized what was happening and added algorithmic countermeasures, now they are essentially worthless, and in many cases, malignant.

Because all the search engines analyze the source of the incoming link, they are all digitally conscious of the reputation these linking sites maintain. If Google, for instance, knows that 50 of your 100 incoming links are coming from known link farms, you’ll no doubt incur a heavy penalty that will keep your site out of the top twenty positions. Instead, your site will sit helplessly in a state of online purgatory, stuck somewhere neither here nor there until it atones for its sins against the user.

Your website will no doubt incur the same fate if you participate in FFAs, or Free-For-All sites, which have hundreds of links on each page. The major engines have evolved to penalize this tactic, and now discount links originating on pages that contain a high number of links. So avoid “Link Pages” on your site because the engines may think you’re link spamming.

Along the same lines, avoid irrelevant links. But what makes a link irrelevant? An irrelevant link is one that is not related to the content or contextual theme of your website. For example, a link from a computer manufacturing company to a software developer would be relevant, while a link from either of these companies to an auto parts site would not. The major engines are conscious of the content and theme of a page, and they know when sites are simply trading irrelevant links in hopes of increasing their rankings. If anything, such exchanges will only hurt positioning.

These types of traded links are known as reciprocal links due to the fact that they’re exchanged, returned, and thus mutually beneficial. But reciprocal links must be relevant and useful or they’ll incur penalties.

In many cases, you’ll also want to avoid linking to sites with a lower PageRank than your own. This can be seen as additional link spamming, so make sure your reciprocated links are highly relevant. If they are, the PageRank of the link partner shouldn’t be your primary concern, as it still presents value to the user.

Another thing to avoid is “vague” links, or links that lack any kind of descriptive anchor text. Anchor text is the underlined, often blue-colored text that indicates the existence of a link. The major engines use this anchor text as a determinant for relevancy, comparing the anchor text to the content of the page the link points to. That’s why you want to avoid vague terms when creating links. For more information on anchor text, click here.

For example, if you own a trucking company in Denver, you’d want incoming links to say something targeted like “Colorado Trucking Services – ABC Transportation Company” instead of something like “Denver Trucking.” This way, the search engines not only get a better idea of what your site is about and the services your company offers, but users have a more complete understanding of where this link will take them if they click it. Don’t make links that require guesswork, or users won’t click them. We all want to know where we’re going before we leave, so make sure users don’t have to surf with a digital blindfold when they interact with your site. Chances are, if you don’t optimize your anchor text, users won’t click the link.

Yet another tactic to avoid is JavaScript redirects, in which users are sent to a page other than the one they’re expecting. Not only do these redirects infuriate users and waste their time, but the search engines have known to take punitive action as webmasters try to “pull a fast one” on them.

Finally, never use domain spam or duplicate domains, which occur when you have multiple domain names redirecting to the same website. Like JavaScript redirects, the search engines are aware of this tactic, and they don’t tolerate it.

All of these “Black Hat” strategies may have worked effectively in the past despite their ethical shortcomings, but the name of the game in search engine optimization is innovation. The major search engines are dedicated to providing the most relevant and helpful results to their users, and thus, they look down upon any attempt that would make their search algorithms less effective. “White Hat SEO” is the best way to go for sustainable, long-term results. If you employ “Black Hat” strategies, you’re more than likely to get your site “black-listed” from the search results, meaning it will never appear again. And even if that hasn’t happened yet, as the search engines continue to evolve it may happen soon.

With Black Hat, you’re playing to the tide; no matter what you do, you can’t stop it. The waves of change will rush in and destroy your “castle made of sand,” eventually.

Moral of the story: Provide users with valuable links that enhance their user experience. If you do, you’ll create a loyal user base and the search engines will reward your efforts to improve the domain of online search and the indexability of information. If you don’t, chances are you won’t be around for long.