Link building has always been beneficial for search engine rankings and driving traffic to your website. It gets good results if done in a professional manner with good quality links.

A good link building strategy is a must before you start your link building campaign. Few good links can do much better search engine positioning when compared to a huge links which are not worth. Search engines mainly give credit to quality links and it is with the help of these links that they determine whether or not, a website is relevant for a particular search.

Quality of the link is measured by Google's PageRank by most people. This is a mistake. The score that is shown on the toolbar does not represent the real PageRank that Google assigns to the page. Google displays the page ranks according to it's own strategy and the page rank being displayed may not be the exact page rank that Google calculated.

At TheLinksStore, we offer very highly relevant natural links and make sure that all our links follow these Link Quality Parameters:

Search engines give a lot of importance to link relevance. In order to leverage the power of anchor texts in incoming links, the link should have keywords relevant to the landing page.

Keyword Research is the building block for search engine optimization. Instead of a "click here", relevant keywords can be used to make the link more user-friendly as well as help the search engine detect what the link is connecting to. This can help you get a higher ranking for those specific keywords included in your link. It carries extra weight as another site is recommending your page for a particular keyword. Including relevant keywords in your title text and anchor text can improve your search engine placement tremendously.

Relevant keywords need to be used in anchor text to increase the relevance of the target page relating to the keywords used.

For example: If you want to get high rankings for a search term like "buy black shoes", then the links to your website should use exactly that text. The text that is used to link to your site (the "anchor text") influences the words for which your website will get high rankings.

Make sure that the texts that are used to link to your website contain words for which you want to get high rankings on search engines. In the above example, a very 'concentrated' anchor text would be the words "buy", "black", and "shoes".

Industry relevance and the relevance of content is monitored by search engines and it adds to your relevance score. Major search engines place weight on relevant links, which is a good practice for Internet marketing strategy. One good quality, highly focused link is better than a link which is not considered useful by the search engines.

All of the major search engines rely on third party links to your site as a voting mechanism to determine its importance, and they also look at the relevance of the site linking to you to confirm what your site is about. The main advantage of adding links from relevant pages is that you will actually start driving traffic relevant to the content of your website - traffic that already knows what your site is about, giving you a chance to get your products or services out there in the critical early stages of your venture.

For example: Links from a wine expert's web pages to yours are highly relevant if you produce, sell or distribute wine.

The fewer the number of outgoing links on the page which points at your page, the better it is. The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PageRank value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page.

For example: Given two pages of equal PageRank linking to you, one with 5 outgoing links and the other with 10, you will get twice the increase in PageRank from the page with only 5 outgoing links.

Link to text ratio is the total number of links on the page to the number of text on the page. Checking the link to text ration on a page is a good way to check whether the page is a links spam page or a natural page. This ratio is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page.

For example: Getting links from a page where there are 'only' links and very little text, is a spam page and won't help to increase your rankings. On the other hand, getting links from a page where there is 90% text/ content and 10% links, will boost your search engine rankings and also drive relevant traffic.

The domain registration date is monitored by Google. According to Google, valuable domains are often paid for several years in advance, while the throwaway domains rarely are used for more than a year.

This date helps establish document history and reputation. The score for a website may include the amount of time since "document inception" - i.e. how old the website is. The "expiration date of the domain", the "domain name server record" and the "name server associated with the domain" are all parts of how Google will establish the legitimacy of an "associated" site. Obviously, old websites are considered more reliable than the new ones. We should keep a check on the age of the site.

For example: If you get links from a website which is 5 year old, Google will give the link more weightage than a link from a website which was established just a year ago.

Having links from different domains is really good for natural listings because Google scoring includes the sites associated with a given site and the "domain-related" information. Associated sites are measured in terms of "legitimacy". Different IP numbers means different owners and not spam.

Paid links are the links bought from existing PR pages and are time-bound in nature. This manipulative link building technique is easily identified by Google and such sites are penalized. The links which are removed within a couple of months of creation are considered to be "bought" or un-natural.

Picking up random links from non relevant pages wont help you in any way. You should go for links from highly relevant content pages which are valued by major search engines. In doing so, not only your rankings would improve, but you also get the targeted audience that you are looking for.

In getting links from content pages, what you can be sure of is that links from relating articles will drive more relevant traffic to your site, increasing the possibility of repeat visitors (as you already know they are interested in the subject and not just "stumbling" across your site).

For example: If you have a travel website, then placing your links on travel related articles will get you highly targeted traffic.