Google wants the Best and not the one pretending to be the best. Obviously, this is being said in context to the relevance and popularity of the websites that get ranked for searcher’s keyterms. Obviously, as a business owner, you are looking forward to getting among the top 10 ranking for the keywords of your choice.

Link building is an ongoing struggle between the two sides with different motivations. On one hand there is a business owner or an SEO who wants to raise the rankings for a keyword and on the other hand there is an army of able search engineers who work constantly on negating and neutralizing any efforts that the search marketers might be using to influence the popularity part of the ranking algorithm.

With links becoming the deciding factor on “who ranks where” on the SERPS, companies are willing to shell out huge bucks just for getting the top 10 rankings. All points such as buying mindshare, building a brand, purchasing advertising are being done with the primary green reason. Green here refers to the Toolbar PR score and not to the environment friendliness of these links.

The best foot forward for your business is when you perfectly pretend that the intentions of your links are far from duping the closely guarded Google’s ranking algorithm. The more you work “under the radar”, better are the chances that your site will make every link count. Let us present some ideas that will make your link building look more genuine and almost force search engines in giving you the due.

• Provide a lot of value – Value is something relative. What might be valuable in one industry might be worthless in the other. And value can come in different sizes and shapes. Some very common ideas may be excellent blog posts, useful articles (like this one :-)), free scripts or tools, useful directories, awards, contests or any other stuff that is deemed important by your target audiences. When you offer value and use a mix of push and pull marketing over the internet, chances are, that you will attract a useful lot of links that will be organic. And organic is the best whether it of food or links.

• Varying the link anchor text – If you want to rank for the term web 2.0 design, it is great that links pointing to your site have those words as anchor text. This is known as semantic benefit and the search engine knows that the next page it is going to crawl from this link is about “Web 2.0 design”. However, when you are trying to artificially increase the backlink count and at the same time, trying to use the same anchor text, signals might be raised about the ingenuity of your effort. Proper usage of keyword modifiers is the key and that should help you in avoiding raising any review flags.

• Deep Link Ratio – This refers to the ratio of links an internal page has as compared to the home page. Usually businesses focus on two or three theme types and it is best to raise these theme types in search rankings individually. Use internal linking within these themed sections and try channeling links to them directly. This should also help in better user satisfaction since she lands directly on the page that is relevant to her query.

• Relevant Link – Search engines, especially Google, are good at determining link neighborhoods. Links from real estate sites to molecular biology sites really won’t be counting that well. If you are in real estate business, try things from the perspective of a real estate owner and see if you can get links from interior designers, construction companies, townships sites, water management and recharging companies, home buyers associations and the likes.

• Temporal Link Graph – Big promotions in short span of time are exciting but they again cause search engines to have a look at the way the links are being built. If a site is known to have existed from last 5 years and has 1000 links to its credit, if you all of a sudden build 2000 links in one month, the spurt can be seen as artificial. Couple this with the quality of links and your link building efforts might not give you any results. It is better to target 10 great sites rather than 1000 low value sites. One great link and you are in the game. Look for simulating offline relationships online. Try seeing your business supply chain graph, you Friends circle, see if someone has a great site and if they can link to you.

• C Class IP of the links – This refers to ownership links. You might be prompted to interlink all your sites together or get 100 crappy links from article directories which are hosted on the same server. Search engines are very good at diagnosing the origin of links in terms of their diversity, the domain ownership and influence patterns.

• Diversify your backlink profile – While building links, are you just focusing on one methodology? This should let your backlink profile depend too heavily on one source which might not be the best thing. Try gaining links from different sources like partners, vendors, industrial chambers of commerce, blogs that discuss your field, forums, press release sites, general and niche directories and old resource sites.

• Link buying – Paid links are a hot topic and a very sensitive one when it comes to ranking factors in search engines. Google has been very strict on this one particularly and this has also caused huge uproars in the SEO circles. Again, the points listed above matter a lot. Contacting webmasters and site owners directly is a better mechanism than the use of link marketplaces like Text Link ads. Also, if the page that links to you ranks well itself in search engines, it might be good sign. If the link has the potential of sending direct traffic, this might be a good sign to search engines.

• Removing Footprints – If using any link building software or hidden links, try to remove any footprints that the automated tools might leave. Search engines are good at diagnosing these and may stop the link value from these links.

• Buying Websites – This is the upper level of link buying and pertains to buying entire domains or websites that matter. Obviously the value of the domain or the website comes in question. Utilizing domains by pointing them to your own site is a great strategy only if done in the right manner. Also possible is the strategy of making changes in the old websites to insert links and pointing them to your own site.

What are the implications of your link building efforts? Do you think some links count and the other ones don’t? Share your own stories using the comments section below.