Basically it means that a link to your site from another site whose subject matter is similar to yours carries more weight than a link that comes from elsewhere. The “Trust” quotient is a measure of a page’s authority and how qualified it is to make a good “vote” (link) to a page. Certain sites like government websites from example, have a high level of trust. But this is due to the nature of their content and the links that point to them – not because they have .org or .edu as their suffix as many people tend to think.

Therefore, it’s worthwhile expending a lot of effort to get links from authority websites instead of trading links with unrelated blogs. Of course, this is easier said than done as a lot of people would give a lot to be linked to from these sites. But then that’s why they’re worth it! If everyone would be doing it, then it wouldn’t be valuable.

Article submissions are an ethical and effective way to get inbound links. These are sites where you submit a useful non plagiarized article and claim credit in the “credits” section that allows a link back to your website. In this case, effort is required to produce good content and have it approved and is therefore much more useful than services that claim to bring you “hundreds” of links. Be wary of article submission sites that promise to submit your article to “thousands of directories.” Remember, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Sites like eZine have strict requirements for their articles and if you submit a good article to them, you deserve a backlink for your efforts. Later in this blog, we will explore more ways of getting backlinks into your site as well as different link building strategies.

What is to be done then? The answer lies in a long term strategy. Along with these highly desirable phrases, there will be many that can be immediately optimized for. Phrases with a relatively low number of searches, but an even lower relative number of pages optimized for it. The two types of keywords require different strategies. One is long term, and one is short term.

One way is to incorporate the long term keywords into the main body of the site. The short term keywords can be added to an ongoing text addition such as a wiki, a blog or a forum. These posts will then link back to the main site with the long term keywords as anchor text – thereby improving the internal linking architecture and drawing more focus to the long term keywords.

Once this is implemented, you can measure the success of your keyword strategy in order to track your progress.