Building links to your website is by far the most important activity you can do in order to achieve high rankings on the most popular search engines. But many people tend to focus on quantity by going out and doing link exchanges or by submitting the same article to a ton of article directories. This will get you a lot of incoming links however the quality of the links you are getting is going to do more for your rankings than shear quantity.

Very often when I am doing an analysis of the top ranking websites in Google for a particular keyword phrases I find that a site with only a couple of hundred incoming links outranking other sites that have thousands of links. So how can this be? Well there are links that are are just better than others. The most important links can have one or many of the following qualities.

High Page Rank - Importance

Page Rank, or PR, is a measurement that Google gives to a page to gauge how important that page is. A link on an a page that is considered important by the the search engines will pass on some importance to your site. These can be local or national news sites or established blogs or sites.

High Trust Or Authority

If the search engines think a particular sites is trustworthy or an authority on your subject then a link from them will do wonders for your site. Directories like Yahoo or DMOZ can be a good way to get this kind of link. News sites can also get you an authoritative link.

Number Of Links

If the page that your link is going to be on has a low number of other links on it the more valuable that link will be. If you submit an article to blog the page your post is on will typically only have links for navigation on that site and your link and maybe a couple of other links. In contrast a link exchange page will have dozens of links pointed to many different sites. The fewer the links a page has the more relevant a link to your site will be received by the search engines.

Closer To The Homepage

Generally speaking the further away you get from a site’s homepage the less valuable a link from that page will be. This is not always the case but usually the fewer the number of clicks away from a site’s homepage your link is again it will be more valuable.

Finding and getting better quality links is not always easy but obtaining one of these types of links could be the same as spending hours manually linking to many other low quality sites. Below are more ideas on where to find good quality links for your site.

Quality Links:

Better Business Bureaus

Chamber Of Commerce

Directories - Yahoo, Business.com, BOTW.com, DMOZ.org, Joeant.com, Aboutus.org

Local Newspapers - They often have on-line versions

Real Estate Company Websites

Established Real Estate, Business or Finance blogs