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You probably don’t need to read the latest advice from the online marketing consultants to figure out the basic idea behind link building. Without links, your site won’t develop authority. Without authority, it won’t move up on the search engines. But even the most savvy online marketing consultant would have to admit that doing that is just not as easy as it sounds.

More Is Not Better In Link Building

Just going out and getting a bunch of links won’t necessarily help your site. You need quality links to get higher search rankings. But sometimes figuring out what makes one link better than another is tough. This is where you do need to keep up with what the online marketing consultants are recommending or you may just be wasting your time.

Targeted Anchor Text Is A Must

When you start pursuing links on sites, you need targeted anchor text. However, you don’t want to use the same text everywhere. Google will notice that in a bad way. You want to use two or three different phrases and the proper name of your website. If you can’t get anything but an image link, make sure the site owner puts your anchor text or the name of your site in the ALT tag of the image.

Pay Attention To Links In And Out

Google looks at the site where your link appears and decides how much benefit your site gets back. A site with a lot of inbound links passes more authority to your site. At the same time, being linked on a site full of low-quality, outbound links probably won’t help you much.

PageRank Isn’t Everything

Don’t be one of those site owners who sees nothing but PageRank. A site with high PageRank can still have low link value. This is especially true of sites that sell links. Steer clear of sites that use phrases like “sponsored by” or “paid for by.” Google may not let that site pass PageRank at all. Move on. They’re not worth your time.

Concentrate On Site Relevance

Let’s say your site is about red widgets. You get a link on a site about purple doohickeys. That link isn’t worth as much as one on a site about red widget management. Make sure you’re pursuing links in relevant places and look at how those places are optimized. If a site owner gives you a choice of having a link on a page titled “About Us” or one with the title “About Red Widgets,” which one do you choose? The link on the optimized page, “About Red Widgets,” has more value.

An Online Marketing Consultant Checks What’s Not Obvious

Take your cue from the pros and check sites in ways that aren?t obvious. For instance, in any search engine, you can type in “cache:” followed by a site url and find out if the site has been indexed and when it was last crawled. But what do those dates mean?

Chances are good that if the site hasn’t been crawled in 30-45 days, it’s not a good place for a link. But some domains have more value than others. For example, links from .edu domains are better than from a .com, but .info is worth less. All these factors should be weighed in judging a site?s worth in your link building efforts.

Does Social Networking Matter?

We’ve all seen the little link bars under blog posts and in forums asking people to Digg or Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. Do you need to try to get links in places where social networking can happen? Yes. Alone those links may not have a lot of value, but Google is increasingly looking at the “active Web” in determining site authority.

It?s time consuming, but participating in forums and social sites and getting blog owners to run your articles with your linked anchor text included can be worth your time. But remember, relevance is a basic rule in online marketing consulting.

Are You Getting Clean Links?

When you get a link on a site, do you go look at the page’s source code? Is there anything extra in the “href” tag on the link? Is the site using redirect code? Is there a “nofollow” in the site’s meta data? If there is, the link is useless to you. It won’t pass any authority to your site because that code tells the search engines not to follow the link. Make sure you?re getting clean links.

When you’re on a tight budget and trying to develop your site and get higher search rankings, it can be a tough decision to work online marketing consulting into your thinking. The Web used to be pretty much a do-it-yourself place. That all started to change in 2004 when people began talking about “Web 2.0.”

It’s harder than ever to judge quality link building in the new world of Web applications and social networking. You can do it, but try to stay up to speed on what the online marketing consultants are recommending as good strategies. The Web is changing all the time. Good link building takes time and effort; you don’t want to waste those any more than you want to waste money during hard times.

Editor’s Note: This article previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s an Online Marketing Consultants expert offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

You’ve just built your website and you want to show up on the search engines. You start reading about SEO and one of the first things that jumps out at you is something called “Google PageRank.” You know about the big dog of the search engines, but what is PageRank and why is it important in what you’re trying to do?

Any good marketing coach can explain that easily. If your site is placing high in free (organic) search results, you’re getting free advertising. Notice the word “free.” That’s always a good thing. Building a strong PageRank (PR) by getting good quality links coming in to your site takes time, but it isn’t going to eat a hole in your pocketbook.

You want to work on raising your site’s PR to get “authority” with the search engines. A site with “authority” gets better visibility in search results. Really understanding the algorithm behind your site’s PR will likely have you reaching for a bottle of aspirin. In the beginning, just concentrate on understanding the basics and how they relate to your efforts to promote your site.

How Is PR Defined?

Google says PR is all about the “uniquely democratic nature of the web” and “using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.” Basically, a link from one page to another is a vote for that page. However, not all votes in this democracy are equal. Some votes come from higher-quality pages and are weighed more heavily. (Other factors in determining PR include the relevance of search phrases on a page and actual traffic to the page.)

How Is PageRank Expressed?

PR values are expressed on a scale of 0 to 10. Sites from 0 to 2 are probably pretty new to the Web and have few incoming links. Sites that have made it to PR3 to PR5 are fairly well established; PR6 and above are really popular and have a lot of high-quality links. There are very few sites that make it to the PR7 to PR10 range.

The ones that are ranked that high are usually owned by big corporations or major media outlets like the Wall Street Journal (PR8). Improving your site’s PR by getting relevant, high-quality, incoming links is one of the most affordable SEO methods at your disposal. Rather than trying to get to a specific number, just concentrate on improving your number.

Is My Site’s Index The Only Page With PR?

No, each page in your site will be assigned a PR, something that is emphasized in marketing coaching as a valuable tool. You can use relevant interlinking to distribute PR throughout all your pages.

Huh? Well, just hang on to that thought for a minute. For right now, just understand the concept that some pages in your site may earn a higher PR than others, and that you can use that to your advantage.

PageRank Passes From One Page To Another

Here’s how it works. A page with a high PR passes some of its value to a low PR page over a link. You can use this to promote your site in a couple of ways. When your site’s pages are interlinked in a relevant way, PR gets distributed more evenly throughout the site. Also, you can “court” relevant sites that belong to other people through your link-building campaign. This is really how your site starts to gain “authority.”

Start By Building Your Index Page’s PR

Generally, marketing coaches will tell you to begin by working on your home page’s PR. This can be time-consuming, and not just because you’ll be building relationships with other site owners. You have to do your time in what’s popularly called the Google “sandbox.” This just means that new sites like yours probably won’t get any PR at all for the first few months you’re on the Web.

How Do I Check My PR?

There are a number of free, online tools for checking PR including PRChecker and SearchStatus. At PRChecker you type in a page’s URL to see its PR. SearchStatus is a FireFox extension that show a site’s PR at the bottom of your browser. (It also shows your site’s Alexa rating, another method to measure online “importance.”) You an also install the Google Toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer and enable the PageRank function.

Is Building My PR All I Need To Do?

A marketing coach will tell you that having a strong PR is only one part of your SEO campaign. For instance, say you’re looking around for a site to link to yours. You find one with a high PR, but it’s a site that sells links. Move on. Their high PR number doesn’t do you any good because a link from that site to yours will have a lower quality and will pass less authority to you.

Understanding the basics of PageRank is essential in putting together a high-quality link-building campaign for your site, but don’t get fixated on the PR number and ignore other important facts. Just gain a basic understanding of what PR is and how it functions and use that to your advantage in building a reputation of authority for your site.

This article published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s a Marketing Coach offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall