We all know already that link popularity has great influence on a website's search engine ranking, but the way most webmasters build links may end up hurting their website in the search results.

The most common way of building links has been seeking out reciprocal links, directory listings, forum posting and then article marketing but with Google's constant improvements this is no longer enough and if you do it the wrong way it can become harmful.

If you really want to step above of the crowds you might want to start considering press releases and paid links. For those with very small budgets I would recommend to buy at least 2 - 3 links from high page rank sites that are related to your site's content. This will add huge value to your website.

Now don't get me wrong reciprocal links are still valuable, but don't abuse! And only from quality websites. The same for article marketing, these can still affect link popularity and the ability of a website to rank on search engines, but you MUST make sure that the articles are interesting to the reader. This means your article must be good which will lead people to bookmark the page. Social bookmarks can add value to a web page that is linked in the bookmark, because "a person" has voted on the referenced URL or article. That is a very powerful addition to Google's algorithm arsenal.

Link Baits is a clever seo strategy that consists of building pages that people for sure will want to link to. The most common link baits offer some kind of tool like a game, a puzzle, a paint color selector or just any java-based application that does one thing or another.

So here is the important stuff. Where are your links? What kind of links are they? Are your links all structured the same? Do they come in the same format (articles, press releases)? Here is the one important to our discussion. Do they all appear on the same kind(s) of website?

1. Make sure you have a robots.txt file in your server, this file is important for web crawlers to know which directories can or cannot be crawled.
2. Check your pages for grammer errors make sure there are no mispellings. This will exhibit about how professional you are.
3. You should use your keywords in heading text (H1) these are still influential in the search engines.
4. Don't over-use the H1 heading tag given that there is no difference between the relevancy influence of the H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 or H6.
   

Did you know that if a page takes too long to load, it may not be spidered by the search engine robots. Try and ensure your pages load quickly.

How quickly? Consider how fast the major search engine pages load. Are heavy graphics slowing your load speed? Try a test with http://www.optiview.com

In all of our efforts to write well for the robots, we must remember to also write well for the human brain. Remember that the human brain likes the appropriate use of color. The human brain likes text broken down into manageable chunks or clusters that are easy to read and absorb. Write your copy using all of the important SEO principles but be sure to strike a balance.

With practice, you can build pages that are content rich and compelling to read.
You can create projects that are pleasing to look at and still score exceptionally
well in the rankings.