The best type of links to build for any website, is one that looks natural and organic and doesn’t appear to have been bought or bargained for. Natural looking links are the ones that are designed to look as though they developed by the referring site naturally and without the intervention of an SEO company, or even your own SEO efforts.

The thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn’t want to see companies or site owners cheating the variables to get to the top of the search engine results page. Rather, it wants to see websites that are genuinely so authoritative and well written that they will attract links from other big sites and that they’ll be shown across social media.

So how do you ensure that your links profile looks natural in this way?

The anchor text that is the words that are underlined when you create a link. Using a SEO relevant anchor is absolutely crucial. Back in the day, the easiest way to make this work was by generating as many links as possible, all using the same search term, in other words spamming the anchor text. This helped Google to identify that your site was relevant specifically to that search keyword and thus it used to help you climb the ​rankings.

But that was much too easy to cheat and the smarter, Penguin-powered Google now looks at this as a sign of a company or site owner trying to game the system. This is very easy to identify also – if all of the links to a website are consistently using the exact same text in their anchors, then this is very likely to have been the work of a marketer or SEO practitioner rather than happen by natural occurrence.

To solve this problem, make sure that the links you create use a variety of different words and terms. Sometimes you should use your keyword. Sometimes you should use a synonym or version of your keyword. And sometimes you should use your URL, or just the word ‘here’ or 'click here'. 

Google has made it clear that site owners should build high quality links rather than a large quantity of links. Quality beats quantity especially when Google is concerned. Thus, a lot of marketers and site owners have been focusing all their efforts on targeting top blogs and other high quality websites. Meanwhile, they disavow any smaller links.

But now consider how this actually looks. Imagine a site like the BBC or Bodybuilding.com. Do you think these sites only have links from the most reputed sources? Or do you think they have a few low quality ones thrown in there too?

As you can see, variety is actually a key indicator of a genuine, organic link profile.

What is the best way to get all these natural looking links? Educate your users to post them! The best way to do that is with ‘link bait’ – content that is so high quality, so shareable, that people will want to link to it of their own.

And there are also some strategies you can use to create link bait too – for instance, making your content a comprehensive resource that other posts can point too.