There are a number of things to keep in mind when building inbound links to your site. The most important is the anchor text. On a side note, I have something to confess… for years, I never knew what the “a” stood for when I was creating a link by typing a href=blah, blah, blah. Once I learned about anchor text for SEO, it suddenly occurred to me that that’s what that lonely a stands for. Anyway, back to SEO…

So, if you sell widgets, and you want to optimize your site so that it comes up first in Google when someone is searching for a widget, you use widget as the anchor text for those inbound links.

Another significant aspect that the googlebot and other webcrawlers record and consider is the location of the link on the page. The best placement is in the primary content of the page or in the upper sections or left side. Text-Link-Ads.com is a site that brokers link renting and they have a calculator that tells you which locations on the page are considered the most valuable, a good indication of where you want your links to be.

It is also important to point a significant number of inbound links to your homepage for a couple of reasons. First, your homepage likely links to other pages on your site so it will pass linkjuice on to them. Also, though I’m not sure I totally believe this one, Google may discount a site that has serious linkage to a few subpages but little linkage to the homepage.

Remember to try to get links from quality sites. Google makes it very easy to know which sites are quality sites… they have a good PageRank. You can see a sites PageRank by downloading and installing the Google toolbar.

So, when building links, remember anchor text, the location of the inbound link on the page, and links from quality pages are all key to SEO.