If doesn’t matter whether you are about to use a search engine optimisation company or if you decide to take a do-it-yourself method of SEO, you should take a look at these link building tips to ensure that your link building helps rather than hinders your website.

5 Link Building Tips

Tip #1: Use a diversity of links

Link building is at the heart of search engine optimisation, thanks to Google and their Page Rank algorithm.

But, like most things in life, there can be too much of a good thing and that applies to the links you build as well.

Generally speaking, there is a law of diminishing returns for the links you get from any website. No-one outside Google knows the exact formula but it’s better to be safe than sorry and use a mixture of different websites for your links.

Getting technical, you should also try to make sure these are from different blocks of IP addresses as well. But if you use a mix of sites that you don’t own and host yourself, that should happen near enough automatically.

Another reason for using a diverse range of inbound links is that you never know when another site is going to fall out of Google’s favour or just cease to exist.

Tip #2. Link to various URLs on your site

Don’t just point all your inbound links to your home page. That just looks wrong to a computer algorithm. Mix in links to other pages on your website to give a bit of variety to your inbound links.

Your “internal” pages should link back to your main index page anyway, so there’s no need to worry about the links not counting as much. Specialist pages on your website (much like our SEO packages page) will benefit greatly from doing this.

Tip #3. Don’t obsess over follow links

A while ago, Google started to recognise “no follow” as an attribute of links. Tests have proven that this doesn’t mean that these links aren’t followed and therefore indexed, so the term is a misnomer but it stuck.

What it really means is “don’t pass across any link juice for this link”. But no follow is shorter to type.

Whatever the underlying meaning, some webmasters obsess about only getting “follow” links. Which is unnatural, so don’t do it.

Get a mix of inbound links and live with the fact that not all of them will be “follow” links.

Tip #4. Use a mixture of sites and Page Ranks

This is very much like tip 3, except it involves the publicly stated Page Rank of sites and pages linking back to you.

There are far more “lowly” sites with a Page Rank of 0, 1 or 2 than there are sites with Page Ranks of 3 and upwards.

Yet some webmasters think that most of their inbound links should be from Page Rank 3 and above.

Basically that’s nonsense. It’s not natural and the search engines will know for certain that you’re trying to distort your search engine placement.

Tip #5. Use a variety of “anchor” text words

Again, it’s only natural.

Different people will use different words when they link to your site. They may be like a lot of the links pointing to Adobe that just say something about you followed by “click here” or they could be typos or they may use your URL rather than words.

Your link building efforts should replicate this and include a mix of different anchor texts so that your inbound links look as natural as possible.

When you follow these easy link building tips you’ll find your website starts to be farther ahead than most of your competitors.