WebProNews

Verticals may be the place to be for a particular business, but Eric Ward warned attendees at a WebmasterWorld PubCon Boston session to beware of flying too close to the Sun.

Link Building And Dangerous Heights
Editor's Note: When it comes to SEO and SEM, one subject is almost guaranteed to draw a nice amount of conversation: link building. Many of you understand the importance of such a task and it's always good to hear what the experts are saying. Take a look at what Mike and Dave offer and share your thoughts at WebProWorld.

Mike McDonald shared The Fear webmasters should have when it comes to building quality links for a site. Those were the topic of the session, Link Building Campaigns.

When building, beware the dizzying heights of verticals. Ward observed that the more vertical one goes when linking, the less likely the site will have a significant PageRank.

Ultimately, Ward does not worry about search engines when link building, and does not let them dictate his linking strategy. "People focus too much on what the engines think about their link," he said.

Mike Grehan of Smart Interactive referenced Jon Kleinberg's study on " Hubs, Authorities, and Communities" while discussing link building. He noted as others have that link building relies on quality, not quantity.

Anchor text still matters; search engines look at that as they attempt to discern what a destination may be about. Since search engines already "know" what they think is important, Grehan thinks it's important to use them to find authoritative link partners.

Bill Hartzer of Marketnet, Inc said the first order of business is to take care of internal links. Webmasters must use crawlable links with descriptive anchor text.

He also made note of a link to a particularly informative thread at WebmasterWorld, the sponsor for PubCon. That thread discusses link development and highlighted several tips Hartzer found useful.

The main point of link building should be to build connections with readers, not algorithms. By building an authoritative, quality site, the links will come. But they require work and commitment to get those sites to that state.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.