Numerous methods exist to create incoming links to your website or blog, and while many will do the job, you need to know that not all links are created equal, and some may actually hurt you more than help you. Also, you may be ignoring one of the best links sources available to you: yourself! Let’s looks at what this means.

Types of Links to Avoid

There are some links you don’t want to your site. These would include links from FFA (free for all) sites, known links farms, known spammers, adult industry sites (unless that’s your business!) excessive reciprocal links, sitewide linking (think about it: what legitimate reason would there be for links to your site to be on every page of another?) wildly off-topic, unindexed, no-follow, links from pages with huge numbers of outbound links, paid links, cloaked or hidden links, and in general links from sites in bad neighborhoods that have been identified as such by Google. These are links you can do without!

Here are Some Best Practices To Shoot For!

Realize that your own site is one of your best resources! Great internal linking, loads of great content and a site architecture designed to give your visitors an easy path to your content is a surefire way to even outweigh a lot of the off page SEO factors that you’re using.

Create unique link-worthy content that not only invites unsolicited links from your readers, eager to share this great content they’ve found, but will also rank highly because of the relevance to the topic in question.

Use video to help build incoming links. This method is very popular in the search engines just now, and is becoming drop dead easy to accomplish. No longer do you need a film degree from NYU to get the job done. Nowadays a Flip camera and a good idea can get you a viral video on YouTube, generating a flood of incoming links.

Social media can likewise tap into the popularity of your content, and bring you large numbers of links from social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and others.

Article marketing is a tried and true method of building solid incoming links that shows no sign of abating anytime soon.

Diversify your link sources, as after a number of links from the same site, the link value diminishes.

Links from Authority sites with a high perceived trust rank matter more than sites with a higher page rank.

Contextual links carry far more weight than links in navigation.

Links from sites that have fewer outbound links are more valuable.

Using free software as links is a popular way to get a slew of links. This involves using a widget or software utility that benefits users, and is not that difficult to pull off.

Use keyword optimized anchor text whenever possible, and diversify the link text. It would be unnatural to have only one keyword dominating the keyword profile for your site.

SEO link building is a matter of using both on page and off page factors to outpace your competition and ultimately outrank them. Using these link building tips can help you get there!