Link building isn’t always easy and can be quite time consuming.  But some people are just not sure where to start.  Here are a few tips to give you a little kick start and help you drive your link building campaign in the right direction.

Look for sites that are relevant to your market. Search engines look for relevancy and 1 link from a good, relevant site will be much more beneficial to your campaign than a load of low quality, irrelevant links. Ok, when I say this I don’t mean all directory sites are bad.  But if you come across a low quality directory, that’s irrelevant to your niche, and will link to anyone, it’s best to completely avoid it.

Avoid pages that have over 50 external links (can check this using the seoquake toolbar for Firefox) Google’s Matt Cutts recommends webmasters keep their links per page to under 100.  Although this may have changed over time, when it comes to getting a link do we really want a link on a page with 100 other links on it?  The link juice on this page will be shared making the links very weak.  That’s why I always recommend looking for quality pages that aren’t stuffed with too many links.

What is their page rank and authority. Many SEO’s hate the use of page rank but before disagreeing with this point hear me out.  Although page rank shouldn’t be used as a definitive measure it does still hold some credibility.  PR does give you a good idea of the quality of a page and the higher the PR the higher the chances are of that page having decent authority with the search engines.  This doesn’t mean if a page has PR0 it’s not worth going for.  Especially if it’s a good relevant site.

Try to get links in content if possible Links in sidebars, links in footers, links in links pages… we see them all the time.  But the links that are of real quality to users are links within content.  The search engines see it this way and love these links.  So go for links within content if you can get them.  Even if this involves offering to write an article for a site yourself. If links on the page are nofollow, don’t bother! We want quality links that are going to pass link juice to our site and help us rank higher in the search engines.  Links that ask the search engines not to follow them will not pass link juice.

Use the SEOmoz toolbar to check for nofollows.  Saying that, it’s still worth getting some nofollow links as well as followed ones.  We want our links profiles to look as natural as possible. Choose the right anchor text Time and time again we see links saying click here or view.

Ask the webmaster of the site you want a link on if they can give you specific anchor text and try using one of your key terms.  Doing this will help your chances of ranking for that particular term.  So rather than click here, go for something like Puppies for sale.

Also consider approaching sites you already have links with to see if you can have your anchor text changed to something more keyword friendly.  But remember to mix it up and not always go for the same anchor text.  And get plenty of branded anchor text links too. So, time to get started.  Start looking for relevant sites, contacting some webmasters and getting those good quality links.