Do you have a diverse link strategy? If not, it’s important to keep this in mind when planning future online marketing campaigns. Search engines look at many factors when determining how to rank web pages and if your website has the right strategy for incoming links as well as outgoing links, it’ll help you get more organic rankings and website traffic. And that traffic could equate to profit.

Not All Links Are Equal

Page rank was previously believed to look at how many links pointed to your website and a link could be considered a vote. The more votes you had, the more popular you were. The more popular you were, the higher your page rank was. If your site was competing for a keyword against another site and your site had more page rank than they did, you would probably get a better placement on the Google search engine results page. Today, Google, for instance, looks at way more than just the number of links pointing to your website.

There are many factors that come into play when links are looked at:

• The popularity of the site linking to you
• The reputation of the site linking to you
• The anchor text used
• The page linked to
• Your site’s reputation
• And more…

If building links to your website, there are many ways to do this:

• Guest blogs
• Article directories
• Blog comments
• Forum posts
• Forum signatures
• Press releases
• Image tagging
• Creating infographics
• And more…

Some of the above methods may be more valuable than others. But not all links have to be designed to do the exact same thing. Some links could help you improve your perceived authority on a topic. Some links could drive traffic your way. Some links are useless. The thing is that if you employ a diverse strategy you have a greater chance of success, especially if you are in a competitive niche.

When creating links from your website pointing to other sites you’ll want to keep many things in mind, too.

• Are you sending your traffic away before there’s a chance they could buy from you?
• Are you sending your traffic to a potential competitor?
• Are you directing your traffic someplace valuable?
• Are you hurting your site’s rankings by linking to a specific type of site?
• Is the link going to help your site or hurt it? Or will the link be benign?
• How often are you checking outgoing and incoming links to be sure nothing is ‘broken’.
• Internal linking is vitally important, too. Intrasite linking can help you in many ways — especially in directing your visitors where you’d like them to go.

Link building is just one aspect of an online marketing and SEO strategy. But it’s a good one! Consistent and smart link building practises could be very helpful in helping you obtain traffic and direct visitors to where they can be customers, too. Want some help? We are an SEO company who would be happy to provide you with an SEO quote.