When you are contemplating different link building methods for your website's promotion and optimization, there are certain things that you should be aware of. While some link building strategies have a number of benefits, other linking strategies provide short-term benefits or even no benefits at all. If you value your time and money, you should avoid low-value inbound link building tactics because aside from the loss of time and money, you'll get little more than that for your efforts.

Here are some questions that you should ask yourself before looking to obtain incoming links from a website:

Are the links crawlable by search engines, and do they pass value?

One of the most important factors for beneficial link building is assessing whether or not a link can be crawled by search engines and whether it passes "value" onto the receiving website. Inbound links received in any of the following situations may inhibit the benefits that you receive from your link building strategies:

1. Outbound links that have the rel="nofollow" tag attached to it.
2. Links contained on pages where the meta robots tag has the "nofollow" attribute added, in some cases even when the "noindex" attribute is added.
3. Links on pages that are "disallowed" by the robots.txt file.
4. Links located on websites with broken pagination, or a confusing internal linking system that prohibits easy crawling of the page where your website link is located.
5. Links located on "orphaned" pages, or single pages of a website that are not part of a flowing internal linking system.

If a website that you are considering receiving a link from has any of the above obstructions, it may be best to stay away from these websites.

Are the links direct, static links or dynamic redirection links?

When considering a link building program, you must be certain that all inbound links obtained are static, one way links. Some website owners, in an effort to avoid passing Page Rank, will redirect users and search engine robots through their own website instead of linking directly to your website. Though these links, if configured correctly, will still help you obtain targeted website visitors through the links themselves and they may help increase the frequency by which search engine robots crawl your website, dynamic redirection links will not pass Page Rank.

If part of your reasoning behind building links to your website is to increase your website's Page Rank, then it's best to avoid websites that do not offer static, one way links.

Can you choose your own anchor text?

Using keyword focused anchor text, or the descriptive text shown on a hyperlink, can help with your website's keyword targeting. Whether you're building links for name branding purposes or to boost your website's ranking for specific keywords, having the ability to dictate your own anchor text is a major asset to any link building campaign.

Topical relevancy: are the links from pages with content related to your website's keyword topic?

Links from topically related websites are powerhouses for keyword targeting. Not only can these inbound links increase your website's link popularity and help to improve your website's general search engine visibility, links from topically related websites, also known as contextual backlinks, can help exponentially to increase your website's rankings for certain keywords and phrases.

Is the website "popular" with the search engines and human visitors?

Website popularity matters, especially when you're looking to obtain a backlink from a website. And, website popularity isn't just about its Page Rank, either; popularity can be measured in two areas: the website's standing with search engines and its ability to deliver real human visitors from the pages that house your website's link.

For instance, there are many article directories which are used with the "article marketing" link building method that have a high home page Page Rank, but truth be told, their internal pages are far from popular where Page Rank hardly extends beyond the home page, and as far as human visitors are concerned...they have visitors who submit articles, but other than that there is no real readership behind many of these types of websites.

The websites to pursue links from should maintain "internal page" visibility in search engines and a real human readership as well.

While there are many link building strategies available to today's internet business owners, not all of them provide a variety of benefits. When choosing a linking program for your website, it's important that these inbound links not only work to improve your website's visibility and placement in the major search engines, but that they have the ability to attract real human visitors from the links themselves.

By using this article as a guide, you will save yourself countless hours and even dollars by knowing first-hand what look for when you are building links for your website.

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