Optimising your web site with legitimate backlinks

There’s no question about the value of effective content in your Internet site . Not only is this determined as value to your visitors but it can also be valuable to other sites looking to use or reference your content by way of link requests or RSS feeds.

Traditionally many sites used email blasts driven by link farms to obtain reciprocal links to their website. Unfortunately many of these resulted in so called “black hat” practices which lead to sites being penalised or worse still, black listed. I would suggest that you stay away from any such offerings, most particularly the free services.

In spite of the “black hat” practices of some, building backlinks is a significant process to be followed for improving your web site’s optimisation. This will result in a higher PR score and improved ranking in search engine results

You shouldn’t be dismissive of requests you get from legitimate web owners looking for a link to you or you linking to them. There are however a few easy rules to abide by to assist you out.

1. Check to ascertain if the site is diluted by a multitude of outgoing links and few inbound links. This is particularly important if the outgoing links are unrelated to the site’s own content.

2. Check the relevance of the site’s content and theme to your own internet site. Unsuitable links do you no favours with the SEs.

3. Check the traffic and page rank scores of the page linking to you in addition to as the domain. Ideally high traffic and a high page rank score are what you look for but don’t be put off by a low page rank score.

4. Don’t consent to any request unless you have proved the website’s current details and its history. What is being displayed at the domain now may be quite different to what a former owner of the domain had on the web site.

5. Ascertain whether the outgoing links have the NOFOLLOW tage. If they do then you’ll get restricted value (if any) by the search engines for such links.

6. Be careful with requests received from any link farming web services that is free. If you wish to these types of services, be sure to pay the subscription and then rigourously apply filters carefully to the sources of any request.

Building backlinks is a long-term strategy to be applied regularly. The rewards will be realised and prove to be satisfying so long as you stick to teh rules and the process. Many are not interested in doing this themselves and fortunately a number of SEO specialists can provide this as an add-on service.

The better advice for requesting links from some other web sites is to individualise your link request. Any good internet site will get many requests per day so you need to have your request stand out. If in the least possible, write to a person. Do your search and hunt down a real person to contact as the chances of your request being read will be immensely improved. Use social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo etc to help identify people and e-mail addresses whenever this information is not shown on the website.