Strategy to Link like Professionals

Linking is a bit more involved. The main thing to remember is that you want as many high quality, topic relevant links as you can get. And you want them all using the same exact URL since Google sees URLs that begin with “http://www” differently than links that begin with just “www“. In other words, even if you have 200 links to your page, if they are split between URL formats, you are not getting full credit for the links.

And forget all that stuff about links to the homepage being “a must.” Of course, getting inbound links to your homepage is great but Google has smartened up. They figure your site overall is probably not that great if nobody bothers linking to your actual content pages. While it’s true that Google ranks pages rather than sites, they do still base each of your page’s worth on its supporting pages.

I won’t bore you with a bunch of technology babble. In short, if you keep this in mind, you’ll always be ahead of the game:

6 Professional linking tips

1. Inbound links should be from pages containing relevant content of a similar nature.
2. Links to your web pages from outside pages with high Google PageRank (GPR) are most desirable. (Note: GPR is NOT the page’s position on Google. It is a value, from 1 to 10, that Google assigns to all Webpages.)
3. Links from (not to) a homepage are typically most valuable, unless they have a higher GPR page to link from. Focus on the GPR. If you use software like that mentioned below, it will do all this automatically. If you do it all manually, get the free Google Toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com. GPR is shown for every page (that has any) on the Internet.
4. Inbound links to your pages should feature your keyword as the anchor text triggering the hyperlink (keyword is the clickable part leading to your page.)
5. Do NOT use generic text for your link’s surrounding content. Make the sentence as relevant as possible.
6. Use as many well written versions of your link’s surrounding content as possible so Google doesn’t view your inbound links as duplicate content.