Typically, when people think about acquiring link building services, they think that it’s only necessary to purchase a few link building packages and then their sites will start to rank very quickly. While that’s true to a certain extent for niche keywords, local searches, and relatively non-competitive keywords, to dominate a competitive keyword’s search results requires both on-page and off-page optimization.

I like to thank Vitavee at WarriorForum for providing an excellent example of this two-pronged approach to effective link building. Vitavee is currently ranking #3 on the US Google search results for the highly competitive keyword of “make money online”. So many of you are probably asking: how did he do it?

When other forum members asked Vitavee of his methods, he was gracious enough to provide us with a very transparent response (quoted and paraphrased below):

• Updated his site with a few 2,000+ word page updates related to these keywords
• Included keywords in the title metatag and on ALL the pages of the site
• ALL the pages have a different introductory paragraph with each introductory paragraph containing the keyword or different variation of the keyword
• 8 month long link building campaign.

What can we learn from this?

We know that on-page optimization can make link building campaigns be more effective, but the degree of progress that Vitavee made within this relatively short time period is simply astounding. By including the keywords and their variations in both the title meta-tags as well as the introductory paragraphs for all the pages of his website, Vitavee made his page far more relevant to his link building campaign. This relevancy is what allowed his website to be propelled to the top five positions for these incredibly competitive keywords.

Of course, we cannot be sure of just how intensely he carried out his link building campaign, nor were we provided with information regarding his former page ranking for those keywords. Nevertheless, this success story is a prime example of on-page optimization operating hand in hand with the off-page optimization to deliver maximum results via the complete link building process.

Many people want to know what kind of backlinks you should build to your site. Edu/gov backlinks, high pagerank backlinks, linkwheels, related links, etc. Although different sources of backlinks carry different weights on search engine rankings, every website must have a wide range of backlink types and sources.

Dofollow vs Nofollow

The nofollow tag was introduced by Google back in 2005 as a way to fight comment spam. They claim when outbound link have the rel=”nofollow” tag, “those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results”. Of course, this isn’t entirely true. I’ve seen websites rank extremely well and tracking their backlinks reveals that the vast majority of them are nofollow. In fact, here is a study proving that they do help in rankings. On the flip side, a page linked purely via nofollow links, won’t ever get any pagerank.

Although nofollow does pass ranking value to websites, dofollow links will have a greater impact on search engine rankings. With these beliefs, many people start focusing on building solely dofollow links – DON’T! The best strategy for link building is to make it seem as natural as possible by building a mix of both nofollow and dofollow links.

Contextual vs Navigation Links

A contextual link is a link that is inserted within a body of text (article, blog post, etc). A navigation link is one that is part of a list of links (such as a blogroll, directory, footer links, etc). Just take a look at Google’s official blog and their use of contextual links. Along with their love for Wikipedia, its no wonder that everyone is in agreement – contextual links weigh more than navigation links.

The concept first arose when many webmasters purchased advertising on related websites and rose in search engine rankings do to the link back. The first attempt to combat this was the introduction of nofollow. The second was to devalue non-contextual links. In theory, contextual links are placed into the article by the article author as a means of explaining something in their article or giving credit to another website. Nobody purchased in-text ads and contextual links were considered to be a bigger vote of confidence than navigation/list links. To this day, this still holds true.

High Pagerank vs Low Pagerank

A no brainer: higher pagerank correlates with higher authority, and links from higher authority websites have a bigger impact on search engine rankings. Everyone tries to get backlinks from high pagerank websites but again, this is unnatural. The best strategy is to get links from sites on related websites of various pageranks, including pr0 sites. You never know what rank the page will get after the next update!

Edu/Gov Links

The main reason these links are given so much strength is that they are very exclusive. There is a complicated process to acquiring a .edu and .gov  domain name, with strict guidelines. As such, many people believe that they carry a lot more weight. Although there is no objective evidence that this is true, they still have a greater impact on rankings than backlinks from regular . We believe that the strength of gov and edu links comes from the fact that all of those sites are high authority from all the high authority backlinks they get.

To sum up, instead of concentrating on high pagerank or dofollow, get backlinks from a mix of sources.