Most SEO’s would agree that having loads of links pointing to your website is going to help with your rankings in search engine results. Loads of websites have link exchange pages with the sole purpose of building inbound links or what some call backlinks.

Having your anchor text in the backlink set as your target key phrase, should make your site rank better for that key phrase, basically increasing its relevancy for that phrase. There is a theory that even a blank page can rank high on search engines if there is enough backlinks with the same anchor text linking to it.

An extreme version of this technique has been called a ‘Google Bomb’, ‘Link Bomb’, or ‘Google Washing’, which is basically when thousands of websites all link to one site, all using the same anchor text, so as to manipulate the search engine results. These days Google has changed a few things so that extreme versions are not as easy to create as they were back in the day. Google needs to deliver Relevant results to its customers, and if the results are incorrect, due to a Google bomb, it would have unhappy users, hence the change. For some information on famous Google Bombs, visit Wikipedia

Another important part of your link building efforts is getting websites with a high Google Pagerank to link to your website. Many of the link exchange pages on websites specify that they only exchange links with websites that have a high PR, or a Pagerank of at least 3 or 4, with the purpose of getting good quality inbound links to the website.

At the end of the day, if you are trying to get good rankings for your website, you will be wanting to get loads of backlinks, especially those with a high pagerank.

Now for the cool stuff!

When you are trying to get your website ranked above your competitors in the search engine results, its a great idea to see where their backlinks are coming from, what anchor text was used, and the pagerank of the site the backink is on.

I like to use a tool called Link Diagnosis, which allows you to put in a url, and get a list of all the backlinks pointing to that domain.

Creating a report showing the links to a website shows the Pagerank of the inbound links, the anchor text used, if each link is No-follow, how many outbound links are on that page, and the strength of that link! Awesome!

With this information you will be able to visit all the same high PR and quality sites linking to a competitor website, and see if its possible to add your own link there too, or even better, if you can get your link listed instead of the competitor website.

Using this method is a really easy way to find a great list of websites that you could possibly exchange links with, or event better, to build a one-way link to your site with.

I suggest you start with the websites that have a PR over 2 for best results. What I like about Link Diagnosis, is that you can arrange all the links displayed in order of Pagerank and link strength, as well as the fact that you can register as a member, and save your reports online, not to mention export them to a spreadsheet.

Another great website that I like to use is called Check Backlink (http://www.check-backlink.com), which offers a similar service. I like both these websites and use them both quite often. I find that although Check Backlink is not as comprehensive as Link Diagnosis, it is a fast way to do a quick check when doing research, while Link Diagnosis is a tad slow sometimes.

Need to build quality one-way backlinks FAST?

If you are looking to build quality backlinks fast, I can suggest http://www.textlinks.com, if you sign up for free, you can place 25 permanent links. Obviously it would be better to pay the $99 a month and be able to place 100 links per month, but I like the fact that you can sign up and test the system before buying. Even if you don’t purchase, your 25 links are permanent and will remain.