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When comes to SEO link building, there are 4 elements to determine the quality of the incoming links namely:

• Google Page Rank of the Linking Page
• The relevancy of two web pages
• The Inbound link title keyword density

and finally

• The Inbound link anchor keyword density

.

We will cover those elements one by one in a minute but first, let’s spend some time to clear those link building myth:

SEO Link Building Myth #1: Linking With a Site That Has High PageRank!

One common myth or misunderstanding of link building is that; people are just looking at the Page Rank value of a site home page or index page rather than the linking page. (Note: the linking page is just an inner page of targeted website.) Since Google assigns its PageRank value of a given web page rather than the whole site, so the value of PR of those two web pages are obviously different. Therefore, when you are gathering links for your web site index pages, make sure where exactly you are gathering links from. A website index home page has a value of PR 4 doesn’t mean their inner pages have PR 4 unless you are asking link from the site home page.

Myth #2: Always Link With a Page that has a High Page Rank

This is really another common myth. Is a web page that has PR 4 is better a page that has PR 0? No it ISN’T always. I can assure you that! Why? Before I tell you the reasons, let’s look at the Google Page Rank Formula: (taken from Wikipideia, the online encyclopedia)

Or in a simple form, the final Page Rank of your web page equals to 1-0.85 + 0.85 x (sum of other web pages Page rank divided by numbers of outgoing links on a given web page).

The 0.85 is also called damping factor that derived from statistically.

Ok, now did I mention the final page rank of your page equals to sum of other web pages that yours linking with divided by number of outgoing links of an individual web page? Now’s let say you have a web page A and a targeted web page named B. Assuming page B has a PR value of 4 that you are trying to get a link with and Page B has 100 outgoing links.

So according to the formula above, your page final PageRank value will be 0.15 + 0.85 x 4/100= 0.184. However, if you don’t do any linking with your Page A, the PR value will be 0.15 + 0 = 0.15.
So you see, you are actually doing just a bit better than linking with Page B which has page rank value of 4. Now what about your Page A is linking with Page C which PageRank values equals to 2 and only have 10 outgoing links? The final PR value of Page A will be approximately 0.5 which is a lot better than linking with a page that has page rank 4 and have 100 outgoing links say.

So it isn’t really necessarily better for you to link with a page that has a higher Page Rank than the others which have a lower PR value. You still need to look at how many outgoing links are there in a page first then do an estimation if you can get more benefits from linking with than link that the others on the web. If you can’t find any benefits, I will NOT link with that page at all! It’s simple as that. It’s also true if you want to do “Do Follow Blogs” comment that we discussed earlier. I came up across a web page earlier of a do follow blog which has PR value of 5 or higher, but got 300 – 400 outgoing links! Sure you will know the “benefits” once you do the calculations!

Ok, next time, we will look at the issues of what do I mean by link anchor and title density, so stay tune!

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Forum posting is another SEO link building strategies that you may use. It’s a quite an effective ways of getting links since you have more control than directories submissions, as well as other factors. Now let’s look at some benefits and disadvantages of forum link building first, then we will look at how you can get those links. But before we look at the benefits let me stress one thing first, please do not go and spam forums with irrelevant or “garbage” posts. Make sure you read and understand the forum posting before trying to post anything. More in later section. Ok first, the benefits.

Benefits of Forum Link Building

Gathering links from various relevant forum has many benefits and they are:

• Instant approval – no need to wait days or even months to get them listed in web directories
• Always Free -most forums allows 1-4 outgoing links in your signature file. But I will read the rules before posting
• Always allow linking with your inner pages(or deep linking). Unlike web directories submissions, most of them do not allow deep linking unless you pay for a review fee.

Now “why relevant?”, you asked. This is because you may be accused of spam by putting some irrelevant links in your signature. Therefore, I will suggest you add links only from relevant or similar forums. Such as if you are targeting a web design niche, the related forums are something like hosting, internet marketing, web design, computers etc. Ok now, although forum posting has many above mentioned benefits, however, it has some disadvantages as well.

Disadvantages of Forums Link Building

• Not permanent – your links may be removed by the the administrator or forum moderators due to forum rules change or other reasons
• May need certain posts before signature is activated – you may need to have certain posts counts before you can post a link in your signature
• May be accused of spamming by just putting a link in your signature – some moderators, administrators do not like you add a link in your signature. They may be various reasons but they just don’t like you. What can you say about that? If this is the case, go to other forums.

Relevant Forums link building – the actual method

Step 1: Do a search in Google for “your niche” forums, “your niche” discussion boards. Replace “your niche” to something like internet marketing, web design, computer, health, weight loss, etc.

Step 2: Do a back link check using the Yahoo! “linkdomain or link” command, see articles “Does your link count?

Step 3: Read the forum rules and see if they allow a link in their signature. Most forums will not allow linking in the post unless to a respective sources such as government, newspaper articles, wikipedia etc. Make sure you check their rules and see what kind of links that they allow.

Step 4: After you finished with those steps basically you just need to register an account, confirm it and stick a link in your signature file.

The forum codes

Most forum software uses special codes for a clickable hyperlink. They are often called BB code. To post a link the code is something like the following, (click the “quickcode link to see the actual code”)
[quickcode]

[url=http://www.yourdomainhere.com/]your keyword text[/url]

[/quickcode]

Ok, this is the end of forum link building. Next time, I will show you more advanced tips, like web 2.0 properties posting, video marketing and so on so stay tuned!