No one doubts how effective good content is to your website. It is not only of value to your visitors but other websites will seek you out looking for sites to link to or from or to which they can set up RSS feeds

Traditionally many sites used email blasts driven by link farms to obtain reciprocal links to their website. Unfortunately many of these resulted in so called “black hat” practices which lead to sites being penalised or worse still, black listed. I would suggest that you stay away from any such offerings, most particularly the free services.

In spite of the “black hat” practices of some, building backlinks is a significant process to be followed for improving your web site’s optimisation. This will result in a higher PR score and improved ranking in search engine results

The following are however offered as simple to follow guidelines to assist your link building program.You should not be off handed to your handling of requests you get from web administrators seeking a link to you or you linking to them.

1. Check the traffic and page rank scores of the page linking to you in addition to as the domain. Ideally high traffic and a high page rank score are what you look for but don’t be put off by a low page rank score.

2. Check to ascertain if the site is diluted by a multitude of outgoing links and few inbound links. This is particularly important if the outgoing links are unrelated to the site’s own content.

3. Don’t consent to any request unless you have proved the website’s current details and its history. What is being displayed at the domain now may be quite different to what a former owner of the domain had on the web site.

4. Check the relevance of the site’s content and theme to your own internet site. Unsuitable links do you no favours with the SEs.

5. Be careful with requests received from any link farming web services that is free. If you wish to these types of services, be sure to pay the subscription and then rigourously apply filters carefully to the sources of any request.

6. Check to ascertain if the site is diluted by a multitude of outgoing links and few inbound links. This is particularly important if the outgoing links are unrelated to the site’s own content.

At the end of the day your link building program is a long term strategy that requires commitment, time and resilience. It can pay off handsomely if done correctly. If you’re not interested in doing this yourself you are able to engage SEO specialists who supply such a particular service.

Owners of well ranked websites will receive many requests for backlinks each day and as such you need to submit your request in a way that will attract their attention. The best advice would be to ensure you personalise you request and where ever possible address you request to a real person. Get hold of the person’s real name and personal email address. If you can not find it on the website itself, then do some research to locate these details