Link Building 101
Just what is link building? Links are comparable to “votes” given to your website by other sites in your community. Your community consists of other sites that offer similar products or services. When other sites link to yours, they are in essence voting for what you have to offer. The more votes you receive from other sites in your community, the better your site will rank in the search engines.
As your search engine rankings rise, other sites will naturally link to yours because they, too, benefit from your content. Because of your site’s increasing popularity, you may receive emails from other companies asking to exchange links. This is where things might get tricky–you don’t want to link to sites that are not relevant to your industry. One of the most common misconceptions about link building is that relevancy doesn’t matter if you have a great deal of links. The idea, however, is not to get as many links as you can, but to get as many relevant links as you can.
What is a relevant link?
A relevant link is a link to or from a site that is involved with or related to your industry, one that will benefit your site’s visitors.
What is a good link?
A good link comes from a site that offers well-written, industry-related content that also ranks highly for products or services you offer. If this site also has plenty of links from other relevant sites, it’s an especially good link to have. Avoid sites with non-relevant links and bad content. Links from .edu and .org sites are thought to carry more weight than links from .com or .net sites.
How do links help?
1. Links can index your site faster. The more often the search engine spiders find your site naturally, the more often your pages (both new and existing) will get indexed.
2. Links can increase your rankings. Search engines use inbound links (links from other sites to your site) as a factor when considering search engine rank.
3. Links can increase traffic to your site. If a link to your site is placed on a high-traffic page on a related website, your site will be found by people looking for what you offer, eventually leading to increased sales.
What are the different types of links?
There are many different classifications for links. For now, we will discuss the two basic types of links: reciprocal links and one-way links, both of which are defined below. Which type of link is best for your site? One-way links are considered the best because the search engines see them as earned links. You earned each one-way link because you offer something so valuable that other sites naturally link to you, and this is generally rewarded in the search engines. Currently, there is a big debate about whether reciprocal links are as valuable today as they were a few years ago. Regardless, reciprocal links are still not as valuable as an earned one-way link.
Reciprocal links–This is the traditional link form in which you link to site A and site A links back to you.
How to obtain reciprocal links–It’s a good idea to have a page on your site that offers information on how others can link to you, letting them know that you are in the market for reciprocal links. You’ll also want to spend time researching other relevant sites in your industry and contact each one of them to request a link exchange.
One-way links–Site A links to you and you do not have to link to them.
How to obtain one-way links–You can obtain these links in three ways.
(1) Naturally–You offer a site with engaging and relevant content and, over a period of time, other sites will naturally link to you.
(2) Article submissions–By submitting articles to free sites, you can obtain one-way links to your site. Simply go to Google and type in “submit article.” Among the results, you’ll find many sites that solicit articles for the purpose of earning one-way links.
(3) Hire someone to do it for you–I would take a look at Webuildpages.com for link building services or RankLab.com which is a company that is managed by a serious internet marketing link-builder, Abhilash.
What are some ineffective or detrimental link-building strategies?
Linking many sites together–Let’s say you own several sites or you created several sites for the purpose of linking them together. The search engines can tell if you own each of these sites and will penalize you if the links are not relevant and are created for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity.
Acquiring links too quickly–If you have access to a large number of links, the worst thing you can do is to create links to your site from all of those sites at one time. The search engines want to see natural growth, so you should add links over a period of time.
Participating in link farms or using link software–Link farms are defined as sites created and maintained solely for the purpose of constructing links between member sites. There are many portals that provide members with access to a network of sites to link from, for a small fee. They also usually offer software to manage those links. The search engines are becoming better at identifying relationships between sites, and if you participate in this type of program, you can drastically affect your rankings in a negative way.
What tools should you use for link building?
The Google toolbar can be a helpful, basic tool for determining a web page’s rank. If you have not already downloaded the Google toolbar, do so. The Google toolbar will tell you the page rank of a site and when that page was last indexed by Google. The Google toolbar offers shortcuts, so you don’t have to waste time typing queries into Google to get the same information. If you do not want to download the Google toolbar, you can use the following queries in Google to search for a website’s stats.
How to find links into a site in Google, MSN and Yahoo: link:http://www.website.com
How to find indexed pages for a site in Google, MSN, and Yahoo: site:website.com
Other search engines, such as Yahoo, offer more advanced tools that provide more detailed information.
Yahoo Search Tools: “linkdomain:website.com” provides a list of all links into any page of a site.
“linkdomain:website.com site:.com keyword” provides a list of any other .com site that is linking to website.com with the keyword you entered. You can also change the “.com” to “.org” or “.edu” to find all such sites linking to website.com; “.org” and “.edu” are considered to have more weight in the search engines.
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