One of the most important aspects of SEO is links, and this has traditionally been the backbone of how search engines work. As search engines scour the Internet and crawl all the pages in the world, they find links pointing to other pages. You know that blue underlined text that you see everywhere that you can click on and your browser takes you to some other page? You can think of each one of those links as a vote. And not every vote is the same.Remember that some sites are considered more authoritative and more trust worthy than others.

In this weighted democracy, there are really just two things that matter, the number of links you have pointing to you, and the quality of those links.Generally speaking, you'll improve your search engine visibility by increasing your link popularity. The more quality links you have pointing to your website from other websites, the more authoritative your site will be to search engines. If no other website was linking to yours, it would be very difficult for search engines to trust your site enough to return it in the search results. A search engine would much rather show results from sites that have earned links and authority.

But you can have all the links in the world, and it won't matter unless those links are of high quality. One thing search engines look for to determine link quality is how relevant the link is to the content on the pages. For example, if you run a recipe website, and you end up with a food blog linking to you, the search engine has no trouble at all with that relationship. It makes perfect sense that a food blog would link to a recipe website. But if you went out and told your friend who owns a gambling website to put a link on their site over to yours, that's going to be a little harder to justify.

A gambling site probably has no business linking to your recipes. And since that thematic connection isn't there, a search engine may not place as much value on that link. Search engines will also look at the link text itself. The text that you can click on is what's known as the anchor text, and if you think about it, that anchor text serves as a pretty good clue as to what the destination page is all about. For example, if a link uses anchor text like "california backpacking tips," that's a pretty strong signal to the search engines that the page on the other side of that link is about California backpacking tips.

A search engine doesn't even need to go to that page and it already knows what to expect. Think about that compared to a link that uses anchor text like "link" or "click here." Unless that page is really about links or clicking here, it's not going to tell a search engine much about what's on that page. Another indicator of quality is freshness and trends. Search engines expect you to naturally gain a steady amount of links over time, and if you don't, it might be interpreted as a bad thing. For example, if a bunch of links to your site showed up on the Internet five years ago and you've had nothing since then, your content may be considered stale, and your site would be less authoritative and less trustworthy.

On the other hand, if you've never had anyone linked to you in your life, andthen on one certain date there was a pattern of a hundred new links showing up on random blogs on the same day every single month, the search engines are going to investigate a little deeper, and they might find out that you've hired someone to buy you a bunch of links every month. And while we're talking about spam, this is probably a good time to say that it is highly recommended that you not try to trick the system. Search engines are very aware of just about every technique out there, and there are some very real penalties for getting caught trying to manipulate the system.

If a search engine finds an extremely large amount of similar links with thesame anchor text popping up all over the place, or links that appear to have been paid for, or suspicious groups of websites known to practice spamming techniques, or any number of other factors, it's very easy for them to figure out exactly what you've been doing and then penalize you for it. Penalties can be anything from dropping your rankings for minor infractions, to dropping you from the entire index if you're doing really overt things. Remember, search engine optimization is not something you do for short-term gains. It's something you build upon day after day, to build long-term value.

Finally we've entered into an era where social media is now a part of our online lives. When people post and share links to our content, or indicate its quality by clicking a button, search engines are taking note. If you think about it, where they used to have to rely on other websites in the weighted democracy, social media allows them a signal that actually tells them what people like. Understanding your audience, and the keywords they are typing into search engines, and creating great content around it is the first step to SEO. But earning the links back to your website around the Web is what really shows search engines just how trustworthy and authoritative you really are.

Building internal links

Earning links back to you from people and websites you don't control is anecessary but challenging thing to do, but don't forget about the links you dohave complete control over. Determining how you link to pages on your own site is important for search engines as well. Internal linking helps search engines understand the structure of your website, the topics and themes of your content, and even the relative importance each page has on your site. We can break down internal linking into two different types: Navigation links and Contextual links.

Navigation links are typically links found on the top, side, or bottom of your web pages. You can think of them as part of the framework of your site.Navigation links are present on every page of the site, and they're used to helpguide users as they click around your site and find what they're looking for.Search engines will analyze your navigation links to determine a hierarchy ofpages that drill down from your homepage, and they will be able to see how your content is organized, and how flat or deep your site's structure is.

Outside the navigational framework of your website, you'll have contextual links. These are links within the content of a specific page that point to another page on your site. And just like external links, these can be very helpful when the content of one page makes reference to the content of another page.Contextual links help users by cross- referencing other relevant information, but they help search engines too. Search engines can look at the anchor text of an internal link to help it understand the content of the page the link points to, and internal links help the search engines determine topical relevancy between pages, and the importance of a page, by the quantity of internal links pointing to it.

When you're building your website, make sure to give some thought and planning to the navigational elements you plan to use across all of your pages.And when you're writing content, make sure you're taking advantage of linking to other pages on your site with contextual links that use appropriate anchor text. Both your users and the search engines will appreciate it.

Building external links

Building quality links to your website will improve its overall popularity in the eyes of the search engines and improve your search engine visibility. But you're probably thinking what most people are thinking at this point. How do I get links pointing back to my site when I don't have control over other websites out there? The good news is that links come in different forms and can be generated from different tactics. First, there are some easy ones. A very common way of generating links is to submit your website or business todifferent web directories. But keep in mind that you are going to want to be extremely selective about the directories you submit to.

What you don't want to do is click on one of those ads that says they'll submit your website to 4 billion search engines and directories for $1.99.There are lots of spamming directories out there, and there are very few thatare actually trustworthy. A good guideline to follow is whether or not the directory conducts some form of editorial process that reviews each link, and only accepts relevant and trusted websites themselves. If a directory is willing to publish any link without any review, it's probably not a reliable directory. The Yahoo! Directory is a good place to start, and if you run a local business, you can submit your information to the different search engines' respective local business directories.

If you have industry-specific directories and listing services that are trustedand unique to your market, those are good places to go next. Another way of building links is to entice other websites to link to your content. And the key factor here is that you need to have quality content that people are willing to link to. In a search engine's perfect world, someone reads a piece of content and says, vow, that is so fantastic that I have to link to it. And sometimes great content attracts links naturally as a result of people discovering it and sharing it around.

But there are other times when you may have to do a little outreach to getpeople to discover your content in the first place. Leveraging your social connections to share the fact that you've posted new content can get the word out. And don't stop there, try to find other websites that you feel have the same audience. For example, there may be a professor at a university that's doing research in your field, and publishes their own blog about topics that are very relevant to yours. Reaching out to that professor and letting them know that you have content that their own readers would find interesting and useful might just earn you a very relevant and very trustworthy link.

And beyond generating links from other websites, these days it's crucial to gain links from social media sharing. People are social beings, and we're very eager to share content we find interesting with our friends, our families, and our colleagues. To search engines, this is a fantastic signal that tells them what content people actually like, and what real people are actually interested in. So use those sharing buttons on your content pages, and use your own social influence on the networks you participate in to get links to your content out there and passed around.

Keep in mind, there are some very bad ways to build links too, and you can be penalized for doing this the wrong way, so be careful. As a general rule, if it feels like you're trying to cheat the system, don't do it. Getting caught is something that will inevitably happen, and when it does, there are some very real consequences that are not easy to undo. Imagine trying to run your business without anyone ever finding you on a search engine. Another rule of thumb is that if it's too easy it's probably going to get you in trouble. Don't fall prey to the companies out there offering to sell you 1000 text links every single month, or post whatever you want them to on their blog for $20.

Don't trade links with perfect strangers that have absolutely no relevance to your business or your content, and don't put yourself on listings or directories that exist solely to get you more links. As with most things, common sense will keep you out of trouble. The web is constantly changing and evolving, and the search engines are too. While a lot has changed with the search engines over the years, the importance of links has remained intact, and that's because quality and insightful content will always attract readers willing to share your content.

As long as your link building tactics keep those key elements in mind, you'll always have an opportunity to build new, quality links.

Finding link-building opportunities

Search engines rely on links to determine whether your web pages aretrustworthy and authoritative. And to earn and uphold that status, it's important to always be on the lookout for new link building opportunities that you can take advantage of. One simple way to find new opportunities is to analyze the backlinks of other websites' ranking for a target keyword phrase.The logic here is pretty straightforward. If a web page is ranking well for the keywords you're targeting, then they must have some good backlinks. By examining their links, we might find some that we'd like to go after as well to help out our own rankings.

Let's take an example, and say we want to find new link building opportunitiesfor the phrase "backpacking tours." The first thing to do is head over to Google, and do a search for that term. The top results here are ranking high in part because of their on-page optimization, but another strong reason they rank so well is because they have a lot of good links pointing to those pages.What we want to do is analyze who is linking to those pages, determine how they got those links, and create a link outreach strategy to emulate those efforts.

One tool we can use for backlink research is Open Site Explorer, another toolthat's part of the SEOmoz tool suite. Let's pick one of those top ranking URLs from the previous search and enter it in. You will see lots of tabs of information about this page, but the first tab, labeled Inbound Links, lists out all the pages linking to the one we're examining. You can play with all the various filters to narrow down this list according to different criteria, but for now we're going to show links from only external sources.

This means we're not going to list links coming from somewhere else on the same site. You can examine each of these links, and your goal here is to gain an understanding of whether or not the link would be a good fit for you, and if so, what will be your link outreach strategy. One thing to remember is that you want to build strong, quality links to your own site. So try to focus on backlinks with a high page authority or a domain authority. You will want to be on the lookout for a few different kinds of opportunities as you go through these lists, and one thing you may discover are additional directories that you can submit your site to.

You should have already submitted your site to many high quality directories,but there is a good chance that you've missed some, and this type of analysis will let you see what other directories your competitors have discovered that may be able to help you as well. Another common strategy that may uncover opportunities you can take advantage of is guest blogging.This is when you reach out to another website and offer it to produce content for their blog. This can be a win-win arrangement where the blog gets content that helps their site and their users, and in return you include back links to your site within the content that you've produced.

Not only does this help with backlink development, but it can also strengthenyour industry relationships, provide an outlet for thought leadership, andimprove your status in your industry. You'll also want to be on the lookout for links from nonprofit sites. Many companies will support nonprofit organizations through donations, expertise, or in-kind work, and many times these organizations will link back to your site wherever they may highlight their sponsors and organizations they work with. Links from these domains are generally considered very trustworthy by the search engines.

So you might want to think about what causes are important to your organization and consider supporting them. Or reach out to the nonprofits you're already working with and see if there is an opportunity for a link or a story that can be published on their site. Another great method is to produce high quality educational content to post on your website for the specific purpose of garnering a link back to it. There are many sites in just about every industry vertical whose primary purpose is to promote industry- specific education and guide their users to informative content.

By creating high-quality, informative content that fills gaps, or by creatingrelationships with these sites to understand what content they're in need of,you'll gain a network of people and pages that are happy to link to you. Once again, this is a win-win situation, where the third-party site gets the benefit of directing their readers to trustworthy content, and you get the benefit of gaining links from trustworthy and relevant sites. There are many more strategies that can be uncovered from competitor backlink analysis, and the key is to spend the time analyzing what opportunities are out there, and how you can take advantage of them.

And remember to repeat this process with a handful of top ranking pages for each of the keywords that you want to rank for.

Executing a link-building strategy

Executing a link building plan requires organization during your outreach efforts, as well as a way to monitor the progress of building new links over time. One tool that can be really helpful in managing your link building prospects is Raven Tools. Raven Tools has a lot of features to help you with the overall Internetmarketing efforts, but one that's particularly useful is the Link Manager. The Link Manager Tool helps you manage your outreach efforts, allowing you totrack your progress from the moment you decide you want to try to get aparticular link, until well after it's been up and found by the search engines.

You can assign the status of the outreach, what kind of link it is, and who inyour organization has the responsibility for this link. You can enter the website you're reaching out to, and you can also add the URL and anchor text of any links you generate, which the tool will monitor over time, providing uptime status and link value reporting. You can also enter the contact information of the person you're working with to gain this particular link, and you can add any additional details around the process, conversations you've had, and an overall progress report in the Description tab.

As you start identifying link opportunities and building relationships with thedifferent people out there that can help you turn them into realities, you mightfind that you're juggling a lot at any given time. Using a tool like Raven to keep track of everything with tidy, sortable, and filterable lists can really help keep this process organized and on track. As you gain links over time, the other thing you'll want to determine is whether or not these links are increasing the overall authority of your site. One tool you can use to get a current snapshot of the value of your current links is the Open Site Explorer tool from SEOmoz.

Just enter any one of your URLs, and you'll be able to see a numericrepresentation of both the domain's authority, as well as the specific page you've typed in. To get some rich historical backlink data, you can use the Backlink History feature from yet another tool called Majestic SEO. This will give you some insightful trend graphs to let you know how strong your link outreach is performing over periods of time, and looking at the Cumulative View can help you see how you're progressing. You can even compare yourself to up to four of your competitors to see what they're up to, and how you stack up.

Being organized in your outreach efforts and having access to link performanceinformation will give you control over your efforts and data to measure howyou're doing over time. Having these tools and processes in place is a key part of maintaining the ongoing forward momentum that you need to keep building high-quality links.