Link building expert Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures explains how you can start getting top natural search engine rankings for your business. Learn the importance of link popularity, how to start a link building campaign, and the power of anchor text.

Obtaining a top natural search engine ranking is crucial for any company that wants to establish a strong online presence. Top rankings means loads of traffic coming into your site and that traffic means a lot more business for your company. Additionally, studies have shown that top ranked companies are generally considered to be the top in their field, whether or not they actually are. So how do you get top natural search engine rankings?

The short answer is inbound, high quality links – and that fact is not going to change any time soon.

Link popularity is one of the most important factors search engines use in determining where you will rank in the search engine results for your keywords and phrases, as it helps them to determine how important or popular your site is and what its reputation is. In essence, the search engines are saying “we’re going to give top ranking to pages that have important and relevant sites linking to them”.

Link Building is the process of finding related/relevant websites and receiving a link from them to you. Natural linking occurs when a site has good content that others will link to without being asked. But to get these links, people have to know about you. It is a catch 22. Building links has become pretty sophisticated over the last couple of years. Today you need a mixture of links from many sources including blogs, articles, press releases, social media, directories and others.

Some common ways to improve Link Popularity:

• Offer unique and helpful information on your website which will make others to want to link to you without even asking.
• Ask friends, business partners, vendors, distributors, family members, golf partners, etc. to link to you!
• Distribute optimized press releases to news related sites to generate qualified traffic & links.
• Look at the websites who are linking to your competitors and ask them if they would link to you.

The Power of Anchor Text

In the following example, the blue underlined words link building are an example of anchor text within a link pointing to our home page. If a competitor of yours is both optimized and has a stronger number of inbound links from quality, relevant websites with proper anchor text, they are going to outrank you. Link popularity has become the dominant factor in who ranks the highest within Google. Other major search engines such as Yahoo and MSN also give a strong emphasis to back links for their ranking criteria.

Search for the words click here and you will see Adobe’s Reader download page coming up first in Google. Interesting enough, the words click here do not appear anywhere within their title tag nor anywhere on the content of that page. Yet, they rank # 1 out of 857,000,000 results. The reason is they simply have more links pointing into their website (using the words click here as the anchor text) than any other website. On a smaller scale, if you are targeting a fairly niche industry, you may only need a handful of strong, relevant inbound links to move you to the top of the rankings.

If Link Building is so powerful, do I still need to be concerned about SEO efforts?

The answer is YES. Proper use of title tags, site maps, link structures, header tags, alt tags and good content is critical to communicate to the search engines what your pages are about. Most search engines pull your title tag as the first line of text within their search engine results. So it is important to work on good content, on-site optimization and inbound links. That is the winning formula.

Tags: Anchor Text, Link Building, Link Popularity, natural search engine rankings, organic search engine rankings, Search Engine Optimization, Search engine rankings, SEO