Link building for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is more about the quality of your links than the quantity, it is easy to build links back to a website by trading them with other site owners and filling out directory listings, but you need to consider where is the value in this.

The main search engines employ very sophisticated software to calculate the importance of links, the relevance how difficult it was for you to get it. If link does not have a lot of relevance, is of low importance and was easy to get then you get a low value score for that link, if however the link is very relevant, has importance and was difficult to get then that link receives a higher score.

In a perfect world all your links would be of excellent quality and you would get a great SEO score from the search engines, but you do not get this in the real world and so you need to aim for as high a score as you can get but at the same time not get too obsessed with just the quality.

So a link from a relevant directory may be more valuable to you than one from a site that has no relevancy, the same is true for a traded link, so long as not all your links are swapped or traded and you have some quality along side the relevant but lower scoring links that is a good combination.

So as not all directories are created equal so not all links are equal either.

If for example you were running a cottage holidays website in the South of England, a place where people could come and choose a cottage to stay in for a week or two, how do you avoid being spotted for buying links, some of the give always are that the text on the page has nothing to do with holidays, cottages or the locations that you serve.

The techniques used in linking from high PR pages to other sites worked 2 or 3 years ago and are still of some value but may harm you if one of your competitors tells Google that you are buying links and Google investigates then they could all be discounted, and this is a waste of money.

So what you want in a link? The link needs to come from a page with relevant text, Page Rank is much less important than relevance of the text that is on the page, also the links to your site need to be spread across the site, so that internal pages also have links to them. You need to avoid site wide links as they can appear unnatural, a variety of link text should also be used when linking to the site, so the link text for search engine optimisation Salisbury goes directly to a page about search engine optimisation in Salisbury.

It should be the goal of the site to rank well for 2 – 3 terms per page of the site, the home page should also not rank for more than 2 – 3 terms, otherwise the page begins to look and feel unfocused.

I would also suggest that you undertake some detailed keyword research into various terms that could bring you in more traffic, there are always terms that have been overlooked by your competition, just think, if you rank well for 50 phrases that bring in 500 visitors each a month that is much better than ranking for 2 phrases that bring in 10,000 visitors a month, and the competition is likely to be much less.

The SEO should be an ongoing and ever changing process so that it encompasses the changes in the search engines algorithms but also the changing needs of the company as you grow different keywords will become more relevant and the SEO needs to be flexible enough to incorporate these changes.