Link building can be tedious and boring and many times can seem like a waste of time, but if done steadily over time it can become a very profitable activity for your business. Backlinks increase your site’s link popularity and this in turn increases your Google page rank.

While page rank is not the be all end all of SEO anymore, it’s still a very good indicator of how popular your website is in regard to search engines. The majority of the page rank for your site comes from backlinks. You just can’t increase your page rank unless you get some backlinks to your website.

Many people go into link building blindly, just hoping it is going to help their ranking, but not all links are necessarily good links. Here are 5 tips and strategies for building the links to your website.

1. Obtain Links From Sites With A High Page Rank – When you obtain your links from sites with high page ranking it reflects on your site. Page rank values are passed on from outbound links from a top-level URL. This means that your home page URL will carry the most value and this is why links coming from high page rank websites are highly sought after. If you can you need to try getting links from high page rank websites because they hold more value.

2. Focus Only On Relevant Links – The Google bots get smarter all the time and one of the biggest influences is the relevancy of your backlinks. You should focus only on getting links from sites that are relevant to your site’s content. Backlinks coming from relevant sites will carry more ‘link juice’ and hold more value than just some random links from unrelated sites.

3. Get Permanent Backlinks – There is one thing worse than not being able to rank well and that’s losing an already obtained high ranking. It’s not unusual to see your website drop out of the SERPs when you lose backlinks. If you purchase links from a link service that requires a monthly subscription then you are risking losing those links whenever you cancel. That drops your links and causes your ranking with the search engines to drop as well.

4. Try To Avoid Nofollow Links – A lot of sites will have ‘nofollow’ tags. These were originally created to keep spammers from posting their random links all over the net. This nofollow tag means that this site will not credit your link as a backlink. That means when you get links from one of these nofollow sites you actually have a worthless link as far as SEO is concerned but they can still drive users to your site.

5. Use Anchor Text – Your anchor text is crucial in building good quality backlinks. An anchor text is the text contained in your link. Google gives this a lot of weight. Using your keywords in your anchor text within your backlinks is an excellent way of adding linkjuice to your links.