Inbound links are extremely important when trying to improve your page ranking in the search engines. So a link building strategy should play a very important role when optimizing any website, but it is not as simple a matter as one would think. Let us get something cleared up straight away, so not to be confused when reading the rest of this article. There are two types of Google page rank:

1. Visible page rank: The green bar you see in the free downloadable Google Toolbar (obtainable at toolbar.google.com). This is what almost everyone thinks about when discussing page rank. What most people don’t know is that this piece of information is only updated every 3 months, so basically it is usually outdated. What most people also don’t know is that this page rank is pretty much useless for any long term link building strategy because of:
2. The real page rank.The one calculated by Google’s very secret algorithms – a number that we will never know.

So why should you even bother looking at the little green bar in the Google Toolbar? The short answer is: “You should not!”

When you initially want to get indexed in Google’s directory, you can focus on the visible page rank when you are trying to find a some linking partners. Remember that it is only an indicator, but generally a link from a higher (PR5+) site will get your website indexed faster than a lower PR one. For your long term link building strategy you should ignore the visible page rank, when looking for linking partners. ALL THAT MATTERS IS CONTENT. It doesn’t matter all that much what the green bar says about your linking partner. What you should look for is how relevant is their content to your own website. Will readers of your website find useful information on your linking partner’s website. A more analytic approach would be to check if one or more of your keywords on the specific page you want a link to is used several times on your link partner’s website or the page from where they are linking. You can take this a step further and click “View source” in your browser menu to see if one of those keywords are used in header or meta tags on your linking partner’s web page.

There are other factors to consider and I will try to outline some of them below.

1. The anchor text of the link to you on their website should be one of your keywords.
2. IP addresses also play a role. The more inbound links from different IP addresses the better (i.e. different domains).
3. The number of inbound links to your website directly influences your page rank, but the number of inbound links to your link partner’s websites also reflect back on your site.
4. When linking internally to other pages of your website or to affiliate pages (sales pages) use a keyword as anchor text for the link for both text and image links.

There is a lot more than this simple list to consider when trying to get inbound links. If you do a search on Google for your main keyword your goal should be to outrank the top website in the search result. The only way to do that is copy and attempt to improve on exactly what they are doing. This is a fairly complicated strategy but an advisable link building strategy. From my website you can freely download Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Made Easy” e-book, wherein he explains this process in great detail. The entire link building strategy he describes can be done manually, but it is very time consuming and requires you to manage A LOT of information. This is where the SEO Elite software really shines, since it will lookup and display all the information you need. You can even maintain a standard link request form within this tool and from there submit it to all your potential linking partners.

All these links will be what is called reciprocal links, which means they are 2-way links. Don’t get me wrong here, but even though this kind of link building strategy is important, search engines such as Google value 1-way links to your website higher than the reciprocal links. A great way to get 1-way inbound links is using article directories. What you do is simply writing an article (again building on your main keywords and phrases) and submitting it to the article directories. This works great because you get to put a link to your website in an “About the author” field and there are literally 100s of article directories out there you can submit to. However, submitting your article to that many directories by yourself is a very time consuming process, since you will have to do it manually one at a time. Lots of directories will also require you to create and account, wait for the activation email, login via passwords etc. Fortunately there are alternatives and one of them is using one of the many payed submitting services. If you don not want to bother with writing your own articles you can hire people to do it for you and there are many companies that provide this particular service.