The most important part of search engine optimization is link building and the process of building high quality incoming links. The more inbound links a page has, the more popular it is and as we know search engines love popular pages and reward them with higher rankings. I am going to do this in a three part series so it is easier the digest. So let’s start with part 1.
We can all get a ton of links to our site if we really want to but to accumulate enough incoming links that are relevant to the engines is the key. 
If you try to “game” or trick the engines you will ultimately get caught in a search engine’s spam filter and penalties that are applied so that your site does not appear in the index at all yet in top ranking positions.
My key to you is to think like a search engine when building your incoming link structure. Search engines want to see link building done in a natural way. What does natural look like? Here your go:
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The anchor text varies – Frank’s Golf World has links on other sites say “golf clubs”, “golf equipment” & “golf reviews”.
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The amount of links increases gradually – I like to keep this number at no more than 15% of total per month.
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Your site links out to only reputable sites – So Frank’s Golf World would like out to manufactures, player websites, and others.
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Not many reciprocal or sharing links – Yes, you can still have them but I would keep these types of link partnerships down to 5% of your overall inbound links.
Natural links vary in anchor text while artificial links tend to be identical. Natural links increase gradually as referral sites add links one by one over time; artificial links can sprout in great numbers all of a sudden.
Sites designed around natural links don’t usually swap links, so their outgoing links tend to point to pages that are known by the engine to be in good standing. Oftentimes these pages have been indexed for many years and may even be white listed — a term that identifies trusted sites not to be penalized. Sites designed around artificial links will often participate in link swapping and have outgoing links that point to pages that resemble link farms and web rings
Natural links tend not to be reciprocal. Artificial links, however, rely heavily on link exchange tactics, suggesting that the sole purpose of the link is reciprocity — having little or nothing to do with adding value for the site visitor by way of providing worthwhile content.
If you were a search engine what site would you rank? The engines are looking to give high rankings on only those pages that people voluntarily link to for great content — not because some webmaster has spent a lot of time swapping links. Read on for tips and tricks on how to build the best incoming-link structure and boost your Page Rank dramatically.
Receiving inbound links from any site will help your site as sites that have no Page Rank now might gain some in the future, but it’s best to get links from authoritative pages. Such pages are considered important and are usually identified as such by Google within their Page Rank scoring system. In general, the higher the PageRank the better the link. Yes, Page Rank in terms of its importance has declined overall from the past but there is still some great value in getting links from high Page Ranked sites and is a good measuring stick for determining link value. Directory examples would include sites like Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, and All the Web. Others like PBS.org, National Geographic, CNN, or ZDnet would be exceptional authoritative site links regardless of topic since each has been assigned a Page Rank of 9 or better on Google’s ten-point scale.
Getting links that match your topic is your next best option is to acquire links from pages that are trusted. Trusted pages are sites that have been indexed for a while and have already been assigned a Google Page Rank — usually PR=5 or better. It helps even more if these pages are on-topic — i.e. they match the topic of your page. Links from on-topic trusted pages can give you a significant boost in rankings. There has to be a balance between on topic and Page Rank. If you do gather links from less than PR=5, then the on-topic factor becomes even more important.
How many links from the page linking to you matters and in a big way because the more links on a page the less “link juice” is passed to each link. Think of it as soup. The more water you put in the soup the less soup taste you get. Another point to remember is the fewer the number of links on the referring page, the better. Ideally, the referring page would have only one link and it would be to your page. Of course, that’s rarely practical. But, having your link on a page with 100 other links is almost pointless because the value of your link will be divided by the number of links on the page — a condition we call link dilution. I like to keep the link count no more than 35 links on a page that you get a link from. While easier said than done, the ideal would be to get your incoming links from popular, on-topic pages that have few outgoing links within trusted sites scoring PR=5 or better. Now, short of the ideal, bear in mind that every link you can get is likely to help you somewhat — and if you can control how those links appear you’ll be in even better shape.
Will continue what types of links you should and should not get in part 2.
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