The market is full of tools that promise the top 10 positions in Google, 1000 backlinks in seconds and so on.

Here is a list of things NOT to do in a link building strategy.

1 . Do not submit your site to more than 50 directories in a month. These should be types of directories where are you are sure that your site will appear.

Submit to more and you will get the sandbox effect on your site – that is pages that are in sandbox drop lots of positions and end up on the bottom of the rankings and stay there for a lot of time. (see here for more)

2. Do not make link exchanges site-wide. Site wide means with the whole site. You will see it doesn’t help you more than a link exchange with a relevant page that is positioning good in SERPS (Search engine result pages).

3. Do not place your link in forum signatures.You will see no difference in SERPS.Why? Its like the site-wide link exchange but more irrelevant.

4. Do not make link exchanges with sites that have more than 100 links on a page (internal links and external links). First of all Google will see that page as spammy.

Another reason is that the PR juice (- the benefit of connecting to pages with a high ranking) be divided into 100 pieces and you will have 1/100 of the “cake”.

5.  Do not use stupid anchors. If you submit your site to a directory articles or somewhere else. Only use the Keywords that you want to optimize.

6 . Don’t use the same anchor more than once on a page. In exchanging links, if an anchor is used on a page more than once to different sites, there will be a problem. What should you do? Add a dash “-“ to the anchor if  you can’t use other keywords. Why? If you search seo or seo – in Google you get same results.

7. Do not make lots of backlinks in a short time without them being completely relevant!! You will get the sandbox effect! (see 1. above)

8. Link exchanges or one way links MUST BE MADE only with relevant content to your site. DONT LOOK for Page Rank.You need higher ranks in SERPS not a bigger PAGE RANK.

9. In exchanging links, use URLS that have keywords in them. This is crucial.

10. Do not create more than one site on the same IP just for exchanging links between them. There’s no value in that.

11. Do not just make link exchanges with the home page of the site. Use internal pages from your site.

Source: How to not start link building for a site – mistakes in seo

Its better to have a link from a web design blog than a handbag shop

Yes, I got new followers on Twitter (28 so far). But I think it should be quality rather than quantity that I’m aiming for. What’s the point of following hundreds of people? You can only read a certain number of tweets an hour after all, for heaven’s sake! So I’m choosing key web designers and web-minded people. Its who you know that’s important, not how many people you know. I’m already getting some good tips from them, and I hope I can reciprocate in kind.

The same is true for building links to your website. If you want to get higher in Google rankings, then one thing you should be thinking about is that you need people to put links to your website on their pages.

But those links need to be relevant.

For example, if you have a web design site, its better to have a link from a web design blog than a handbag shop. You might think that any link is OK – but that’s not true. You don’t want bad karma from, say, a porn site – I’m not joking about the karma – first, Google will see that the porn site doesn’t have the same content as yours (I hope) and second it’ll be associated with loads of other dodgy, spammy, scammy and ‘black hat‘ sites, which will affect your ranking.  If you want to be treated well by search engines you need to play clean and fair yourself, and you need to be connected to clean and fair sites.

So I’ve just spent all last evening and all morning written off to loads of other web design-ish sites (86 of them), and I’m hoping that some will write back and we can make links to each other. That way I can provide a service to interested parties and clients by giving them good ideas and even links to my competitors … and also hopefully I can help others too if they link to me.