Link Building is a very important weapon in the Search Engine Optimisation arsenal. But when it comes to Link Building, it pays to fire one precise shot and avoid a trigger-happy link building spree. Because when it comes to Link Building, quality beats quantity every time.

When search engines, like Google, compile the results of a particular search them rank them on a number of factors, most importantly their relevance to the search topic, their popularity and their authority on the subject.

One way to improve your site’s perceived popularity is to create a network of links, which navigate a user to your site from within others. You might think that the more links you were to successfully embed into other sites, the greater the improvement of the site’s popularity, but unless the sites in which you build links are relevant to the keyword subject matter, you could actually be hampering the Search Engine Optimisation process. The reason for this is simple. In order to prevent sites from flooding the web with links back to their site, regardless of how irrelevant the site is to their target demographic, search engines will penalise websites for building links within irrelevant subject matter. This will negatively affect your placement in search result listings.

In general, the more popular and authoritative the site in which you place the link, the better the improvement of your own search position as a result. That is why placing links to your site within sites that are relevant to the keywords you want to hit is great SEO performance.

A link on a hugely popular and important site, so long as Google recognises the correlation between the two sites can be a very effective SEO tool. When link building it is useful to demonstrate moderation and make sure that the links you’re dishing out will help you to improve your search engine rankings and not directly harm them. So long as you can prove the relevance and usefulness of the link you’re likely to reap the benefits. But caution is always advised when your actions could be penalised because of search criteria.