After recent changes in search engines ranking mechanisms, relevant link building has become one of the most important ways of Search Engine Optimization. Now it is almost as important as having a web site loaded with good content.

Why do you need link building?

It's simple: the more relevant links to your website the more important your site appears to search engines and that should lead to better your page ranking. Search engine spiders are restlessly traveling through the Internet, constantly evaluating existing web pages - the keywords they use and the number of relevant links to your website. Because now relevant links are deemed more important than keyword density, some one way and relevant link building strategy is necessary if you hope to get to the top 10 or at least top 100 of web pages in your category.

While you have to create your own link building strategy that will fit into your situation, there are a few general tips. If you follow them, you will avoid many common link building mistakes and you can hope for greatly improving your website ratings in just a few weeks.

1. Use short URLs

When you submit your link to other sites that have a theme relevant to yours, make sure that offer a short URL. You can speed up the link building process by almost 50% if only you would use shorter URLs. Most webmasters will agree on adding a axbxcxex.com link, but won't accept a link that will look like axbxcxexg.com/articles/general/index.php/id=brnd. Even if your link building strategy relies on submitting deep links, they need to be as short as possible.

2. Be careful with redirect links

No site owner likes redirects. If you want to make your link building easy and fast, you should avoid them every time it is possible. They are often used to avoid long URLs, but it's often a deadly mistake. Instead of redirects, you may consider simplifying your website map and making the URLs shorter. While it may be easier for your web site builder to have long addresses, every sophisticated link building strategy calls for making them as short as possible.

3. Keep the same URL over time

Don't change your URL unless you have really good reason to do that. If you do change, you will have to do all that link building again from the beginning. Even if you redirect from your old web address to the new one, you have to consider the possibility that many webmasters delete redirect links from their websites. As a result, you can expect that you will lose about 25% links just because you've changed your website URL.

Just what are the searching engines looking for in the way of relevant links? No one knows for sure, but common sense tells us that links from a gardening site to a dirt bike site are not complementary.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for gardening information on the internet. They come to your gardening site and feel they've found helpful information. Oh look, they think, there's a link there by pansy graphic. I'll just click that and get more good information. Yeow, what does a girl in a bikini sitting on a dirt bike have to do with gardening? And there goes your credibility with your viewer and the search engines.

It appears that the value of links is swinging to a reasonable number if good quality links rather than a thundering heard of indiscriminant links from anywhere.