The reason Google is the most successful search engine in the world is because they provide the best search engine results, pages ranked by tangible value. That tangible value is a combination of content and links, with links being the more important factor (they assume any pages linking in will only link to good content or risk their own ranking.)

1.) Link Deep and with Relevance.

So why is deeper better and what's this about relevance? Google figured out that a link to a homepage is only good if that homepage has the information the visitor needs. If a person clicks a link for "amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe" and ends up on the home page, which has nothing of the sort, Google discounts it as a wasted link. On the other hand, if the link leads to the page containing info on the "Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe," even five levels deep, the link has huge value to the visitor and to Google.

Want some proof? You already have it if you have ever used Google's AdWords pay per click service (PPC). They will not even accept PAID links to pages that are not the most relevant for their visitors, regardless of what you are willing to pay per click. Now that is saying something!

2.) Use Absolute Links Internally.

It sounds complicated but it is not. Absolute links are those with a fixed full URL. There is another kind, called "relative" links that skip the first part of the domain and remain "relative" to the file structure. Let us take a look at the difference.

Here is the absolute link to the Google Ads page from Google's homepage:- "http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/".

Here is what it might look like as a relative link:- ".../intl/en/ads/" Too cut a long story short, absolute links help your SEO efforts and relative links do not.

3.) Use Keywords in Anchor Text.

Use relevant keywords in your link anchor text (that is the text within the hyperlink.) Forget about "Click Here" like you see on so many sites. Not only does that not help your ranking, it actually lowers the relevancy of your real keywords because Google believes that if a word is important enough it will likely be used as part of a link to get the visitor where they want to go.

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4.) Follow the 1% Solution.

Make no more than 1% of your page text into links (both outbound and internal.) That is, if you have 500 words on the page there should be no more than 5 text links total. And do not overuse the same keyword text for the links. So if you have three mentions each of three different keywords, try to use each just once in a link. Then use similar text for any remaining links.

Example: If "chocolate chip cookies" is your main keyword phrase you might use "chocolate chip cookies" as the anchor text for one link and then "my favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe" for another link.

It is also a good idea to use 10 links max per page whether you have 1,000 words or 10,000 words on that page.

5.) Add a Link Failsafe.

This is really simple and almost nobody does it. Links get broken more often than we like. Sometimes it is because we moved a page and sometimes it has nothing to do with anything we consciously did (especially with blogs.) The solution is to create a custom 404 error page (Page Not Found) that looks just like any other page on your site and has a simple note like "We are sorry we cannot find the page you are looking for. However, if you love cookies of all kinds we think you will find exactly what you want by clicking on one of the following links".

6.) Get the Best Links Possible.

This is extremely important yet often overlooked because it can be such a difficult and time consuming job. If you take nothing else away from this article, please take this.

Finding the best possible inbound links is the single most important thing you can do to make the number one spot on Google.

We at SEO-Designers would like it known that the above article was written by "Mike Small". His views are purely his own, and must not be taken in context with our site. SEO is not a exact science and one person methods / theories varies from person too person.

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