How to Build Effective and Beneficial Link Partners
– by John Gracey

Building links is, without a doubt, one of the most effective ways of ensuring a successful web site. The benefits of linking are multi-faceted and can result in better search engine ranking, increased targeted traffic, and improved content value for your site visitors.

To accomplish the objective of better SE ranking, however, your linking strategy must focus on setting up the correct structure while obtaining links from the "right" partners. That is the single, most effective strategy for elevating a page's relevance – the key to top placement.

Here are a few simple, yet effective, guidelines to help you on your way to a successfully linked web site.

Keep your link partners relative!

Relevancy should be your most important guideline in determining link partners. Since a search engine's primary task is to provide the most relevant search results for your search query, your inbound links from other sites must, or should, assist the engines in defining the content of your site.

Relative linking will provide your site with links from pages that are utilizing some (ideally, many) of the same keywords or key phrases. This will assist in your achieving top placement for those keywords and phrases. It will also help drive the kind of targeted traffic that is already, potentially, pre-sold on buying what you have to offer.

So, in order to get the most benefit from the inbound link, you need links to your site from other web sites that are relative in content to yours.

To paraphrase what Google says, put good content on your sites and get some good inbound relative links and you've potentially created something of value to the net. Following this guideline is one of the best, and simplest, paths to ranking success within Google.

Just how important is PageRank?

If you are new to PageRank, it is one part of the many factors that Google uses in determining search result placement.

In the months past the common belief was that PageRank was something that should be a key factor when determining link partners. There was a time when we only sought partn...