Incoming Links and key phrases that add value to your site

I should not start the blog explaining the importance of incoming links or the quality of links that go to help your site. This all is well understood and recognized. I would start from point that, the role that anchor text plays in the usefulness of an incoming link. Let me confess, during my initial days as webmaster, I had no clue about the role being played by anchor text in the value of the link.

As an example, if you are selling holiday resorts and the incoming link uses anchor text of say “school education” then half of the link power is wasted. Quite often, people end up preferring company’s name in the anchor text, which unless it relates to your field of business, is of no much consequence. For maximum benefit to your site, an Incoming link should use right and relevant anchor text and should preferably be from a relevant keyword rich page.
Of course, links from pages with high page rank, .gov, .edu, .net sites carry higher weight. A link at top of page is also believed to have more weight than links at the bottom of pages. It's the same with keyword phrases. A keyword phrase in the heading is worth more than in the body text. One way links too are better than reciprocal ones and yes, take care, even three way linking is being detected by search engines.
Links from sites that are known to sell links are also being discounted by search engines.
While getting a link, ensure that it does not have a no-follow tag. No-follow tag tells the search engines to ignore the link. Obviously you do not want links to your web pages to have no-follow tags. Some dishonest people will exchange links with you but use no-follow tags in the links to your pages to preserve their own link power.
Google's guidelines recommend no more than 100 links per page, provided the page has sufficient content. So, normally, an ideal page should restrict itself to not more than 60 links (playing it safe) but a perfect page that links to your pages should have no more than 20 links.