One of the most important parts of a successful SEO strategy is link building. If you want your website to rank higher on search engine results pages, it’s important that you increase the amount of links to your domain from relevant quality sites. Building links is basically an off-page optimization technique that plays an important role in improoving site’s status and reputation with the search engines. It helps to raise your ranking in major search engine result pages for your target keywords.

The idea behind link building is, the more links coming back to your website, more is the probability that your site will be on the top in search results. Link building, however, has to be done carefully. Here are some important tips for link building

Dos of Link Building

• Keep your focus on relevant links only. Build links with high authority websites that are related to your site theme. These relevant links will help you to build authority in your niche. Also, visitors to such sites are more likely to click on your links giving you increased traffic.
• Publish articles, press releases and blogs on article and free blog sites. Make sure your content is unique and original with your links embedded in it using important keywords as anchor text. These incoming links coming embedded in the content are valued highly by the search engines.
• You can also submit your site link to web directories; it is the most popular yet effective method of link building. Links from free directories are discounted by search engines, however they help keep your link profile natural. There are numbers of free and paid web directories, think over which is good for you as per your plan.
• When you visit relevant websites, try to find out if they have discussion panels or forum sections. If they do, take part in discussion, post your comments, putting your site URL in your signature. But make sure the comment you post is appealing and inspiring for the members of the forums which will influence them to visit your site after reading your comments. That can give additional targeted traffic to your website.
• Doing competitor analysis is always very important. Check all the websites linking with your competitors and try building similar links to your site as well. Sometimes you may need to send a friendly and professional mail to the webmasters of these sites to get a backlink from them.

Don’ts of Link Building

• When you are writing to other webmasters asking for a link to your site, don’t show that you are very much desperate to get backlinks to your website. Write a good professional mail and ask them to go through your site and consider giving a link to it.
• Always avoid putting your site’s link on sites that are not related to you in any case. This will not do any good for your site; instead it will harm your reputation and authority.
• Don’t spam your articles or blogs with lots of links. Whatever you write in your article or blog must be original, informative and good for the readers; this is the only way to attract the visitors.
• Don’t post your website link directly on discussion forums and chat rooms; this kind of self publicity might get your account banned from that forum. In the forums you always get a place called signature, where you can easily put your website’s link.
• Google counts all the incoming links. So more the incoming links to your website, better it is for your website to appear on top in search results.

Always remember that Internet marketing method do not show its results immediately, you must have enough patience to obtain a high rankings in major search engines.

Technorati Tags: SEO strategy, off-page optimization, search engine, link building, backlinks, Google, Internet marketing