15 Essential Strategies for Building & Structuring Inbound Links

Natural links vary in anchor text while artificial links tend to be identical. Natural links increase gradually as referral sites add links one by one over time; artificial links can sprout in great numbers all of a sudden.

Sites designed around natural links don't usually swap links, so their outgoing links tend to point to pages that are known by the engine to be in good standing. Oftentimes these pages have been indexed for many years and may even be white listed — a term that identifies trusted sites not to be penalized. Sites designed around artificial links will often participate in link swapping and have outgoing links that point to pages that resemble link farms, web rings, or isolated nodes (i.e. page groups linking to each other but lacking inbound links from outside trusted sites).

Natural links tend not to be reciprocal. Artificial links, however, rely heavily on link exchange tactics, suggesting that the sole purpose of the link is reciprocity — having little or nothing to do with adding value for the site visitor by way of providing worthwhile content.

Keeping these facts in mind, one should strive to build the most natural-looking incoming-link structure possible. From a search engine's point of view (SEPOV), the best kind of links are unrequested links. The engines are looking to bestow high rankings on only those pages that people voluntarily link to due to great content — not because some webmaster has spent a lot of time swapping links. Read on for tips and tricks on how to build the best incoming-link structure and boost your PageRank dramatically.

While it's true that almost any link from anyone will add something of value to your page popularity, it's best to get links from...

Your next best option is to acquire links from pages that are trusted. Trusted pages are sites that have been...

Another point to remember is the fewer the number of links on the referring page, the better. Ideally, the referring page would have...

Avoid run-of-the-site links. These are links where...

Question: Are you aware that...
...are all technically SIX different URLs even though each will land the site visitor on the same webpage? That's right. And, if those who link to you use six different URL formats to point visitors to your "home" page then your PageRank is being diluted by a factor of...

It's very important that you get your keywords into the...

A word of caution: it will look more natural from an search engine point of view if the text links that are pointing at your site are...

Make sure that some of your links are deep links — i.e., links to...

See to it that your incoming links from off-site pages do not include...

Rather than swapping links (which should always be your very last strategy), consider some of your alternative options for acquiring incoming links. Probably the best place to start is...

Figuring out where to get your incoming links from is like solving a puzzle. It takes a little creativity coupled with following formulas and patterns. Ask yourself, who else has...

Here are a few more ideas to help you spark that creativity...

When all else fails, you may begin considering reciprocal links. However, we don't really like this strategy all that much because...

Focus your efforts on collecting all the links you can from authoritative sites. Most importantly, be very careful about...

Gaining links from off-topic and perhaps not-trusted sites may not be your first choice, but, reportedly, it won't exactly...

Of course, our biggest assumption is that you're optimizing your site with profits in mind. That being the case, you'll want to always focus your efforts on...