A good web site will have quality content, good navigation and strong branding to help achieve it’s goals. Acquiring links should be an important one of those goals and if your web site achieves the kind of quality standards your visitors expect, some of your visitors will want to link to you. Go above and beyond the visitors’ expectations and you’re really talking business. This is clear, so what I will focus on here is how you can outreach more effectively by taking control of the kind of inbound links you can benefit most from. We will look at neighborhood and link quality.

You may think a link is just the same as any other, wherever it comes from and you would be wrong. Try to put yourself in the position of the Search Engine and think about the relevancy of the web site linking to you. Apart from the fact that having a link to a web site selling cat food from a web site selling spare tires would not yield many clicks, the search engines would get a mixed signal as to what neighborhood you are a part of, thus decreasing the potential value of a link to you. This is common sense, so try to avoid sending out link requests to a list of sites that have not been screened for relevancy. Few links to your web sites from industry related web sites are more valuable than many from unrelated web sites.

Anchor text (what the text link reads) for your link is very important. Not only will this give the visitor a better understanding of what they are going to get when they click it, but the search engines will also be given more focus on the topic of your web site. This increases the chances of your site being found in the SERPs, for the terms used in the anchor text, as a part of their search.

Now that we know that the anchor text to your web site is important, what should the text read more specifically?

Anchor text should be:

• Descriptive
• Short
• Enticing
• Varied

Examine the kind of traffic you are getting from each of the different link text you are using and refine the quality of traffic you are getting from them. You may find that one of the anchor texts in use on some of the web sites linking to you are bouncing off your site more frequently. You may also find that some types of web site convert better for you than others or spend more on average. In short, learn what works best and what does not so that the quality of the new traffic is as high as possible. In the end, the return you are going to get from the time invested in the link building process is all that matters. Sometimes, less really is more.