The most important aspect of good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is link-building. It is commonly known that inbound links from external websites is highly prioritized in Google’s search algorithms. It’s a democratic process in which the authority and significance of a page for a particular keyword is voted on by links.

And it can’t be just any kind of links. In fact, there are many companies out there that have built thousands of links for their websites to no avail. The reason is because those links have very low value in the eyes of Google. These are usually from link farms and other black hat methods which no longer work as Google has improved in catching these techniques.

The best kind of inbound links, also known as backlinks, are those that come from legitimate sites, have the corresponding keywords as anchor texts, and is surrounded by text. In addition to this, pages with higher authorities ascribe more value to those links as well.

The best way to build these kinds of backlinks is to write content for other legitimate websites in return for these types of links. This would include submitting 300-500 word articles to directories like Hubpages, Squidoo, GoArticles and the like. These articles allow you to include at least 2 links that are dofollow, which is an html code that indicates to Google that these links can be included as legitimate backlinks.

For a busy internet marketer, writing enough 300-500 word unique articles to provide enough of these backlinks to raise their search engine rankings can be a challenge. So the best way to accomplish this is through outsourcing your backlinking efforts. Read the rest of this entry »