In addition to being one of the most important SEO strategies, it is possibly one of the most controversially misunderstood and argued SEO topics in today’s 2009 market.

One thing that we as SEO experts can agree upon is that search engine algorithms have changed on a regular basis throughout the years and that over the years many factors have come to pass and new ones come into play with each having significant value in relation to how search engine search bots index our sites and ultimately determine our natural organic search term search rank.

Without giving away too much of that coveted SEO inside information it is common knowledge that the value of targeted anchor text and the content of the page you are linking to as pertaining to how it directly effects the way search bots interpret your page and index your website.

You may have at one point or another heard or read about the “Discredit of having links from unrelated websites linking back to your page”, or indeed how search engine moguls like “Google may see this as unfavourable and how it could possibly have a negative rather than positive effect on your search rankings”. Is this true or is it a myth?

Google especially is very content driven and pays very close attention to keyword density, anchor text and backlinking alike. In the end there is one common denominator that stands true across the board for all search engine search bots everywhere… “Its a robot!”
Yep, believe it or not… its a robot! And it only knows what you tell it!

The number of links linking to your website can have a wide range of effects to the effectiveness of your linking strategy and how the search bots interpret your site. What kind of message are you sending to these search bots if you have 10,000 irrelevant links to your website? The Answer: Garbled. “Garbled information in links that drill down to an endless abyss of failed websites in the wrong category on a page no one will ever see.”

The value of links isn’t the volume of them but how they will help search bots work out what keywords your site is relevant for and how to properly index you.

Personally, I would trade those 10,000 irrelevant links for 10 relevant links any day of the week… thus, when planning out your next linking strategy you may want to determine who is going to benefit most from the link that you trade and make a list. Are you willing to put a competitors link on your website? I’m guessing not… then you have to ask: would a top competitor even consider linking back to you? Definitely not! So, where do you go from here? What’s all the hype about linking strategies then?

The biggest mistake one can make in this business is to think that they can achieve this status in a day, week or even a month. That paying a so-called SEO company to submit their site to 50,000 search engines and directories at once is going to solve ALL their problems overnight and that the site visitors and online business is going to come raining down upon them providing riches never before seen and all prayers will have been answered. Not likely peeps…

Quality links can come from many different avenues on the web – the debate lies in Paid vs. Free Links

Paid vs. Free Links has long been a debate within the SEO community… especially with the recent popularity of sites such as AboutUs, Yelp and like sites, social networking business sites and others. There are thousands of free directories to choose from with more popping up daily… it seems the opportunities are wide open and all that’s needed is the patience to manually sit and submit and again all our problems will be solved… but again not so fast.

Here’s the catch: If the chosen directory is full of outdated sites, spam sites, or mis-categorised sites, it’s probably not the best choice of places to list your website. So, where does that leave us?

Paid sites: Paid directory listings are the so-called niche sites on the web and niche sites hold the greatest value. But, let me just make a point before I get too deep here: Not all paid sites are beneficial sites. A paid directory listing and a free directory listing can have the same indexing value so long as the category is specific to the site. However, you are more likely to achieve this by listing yourself in a category specific directory.

I will take this opportunity to use my own directory as an example. My directory happens to be a “category specific” directory that caters specifically to Attorneys, Law Firms and Expert Witnesses (notice the use of key search terms in my link – this is called “anchor text”) this type of directory is full of rich content specific to the legal industry and attorney’s that practice in the United States, it holds no other links other than links to other attorney’s and expert witnesses. A law firm listing themselves in this directory will benefit greatly from this link and can even gain an extra value point for linking back to the directory if they so desired.

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