What is Link Building
Purposeful link building goes back to the famous, top secret Google site ranking algorithm. The theory behind Google’s search engine is simple – in the scientific world, important works, articles, books… are cited by lots of people i.e. the more important a work, the more other people referenced it. The same thinking goes for websites; people link, bookmark and write about important stuff. Search engines now check and keep count of how many sites are linking to a site. But here is the catch. A doctor is in no position to tell you which farmer’s technique is better – rather, you would respect a farmer when tons or farmers tell you that a particular farmers technique is the best. This means that a link pointing to your site would do you no good if it comes from a site unrelated to the theme of your site. Congratulations! You’ve just learnt external link building.
WHY BUILD LINKS?
In case it was not clear why you should get links from other sites, building links from external sites improves your visibility in search engines. It allows your site to be found when people search in search engines like Bing, Google, Yahoo…
WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN BUILDIGN LINKS
Charity they say begins at home. And therefore, it makes sense to start your link building campaign from where you have most control – your site. The linking structure of your site counts a lot. When you link to a particular page from all other pages in your site, it is like you are giving attention to that page and therefore increases its importance in the eyes of your visitors, search engines. Keywords: When you want to rank on search engines for the words “best aeroplane” for example. Make sure the keyword shows up in the anchor text that is pointing back to your site. The anchor text is the text people see on the hyper-link pointing to your website. It is quite important that you vary the anchor text that links back to your site.
HOW TO BUILD LINKS
1. Blog commenting: visit blogs with themes similar to yours and post valuable comments. Most of them allow you to post links back to your website.
2. Forums: join popular forums in your niche – most allow you to include a link pointing back to your site. The signature is automatically included whenever you make a comment or post.
3. Article directories: a lot of article directories are available on the internet. Major ones like ezinearticles, Isnare.com… have high ranking on search engines. Take advantage of them by posting helpful and relevant information on them – not only that, blog owners frequently visit them to source for content and are required to keep the link in your article thereby giving you a link from their website with the anchor text that you want.
4. Social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, Friendster… are valuable link sourcing medium. When used with caution, it could bring lots of free traffic to your site.
5. Press releases: You can not only get quality backlinks from press release sites but also lots of traffic. You could start a competition; give free gifts or some other news worth event.
6. Put a bookmark form on your site: if your content is good, people would want to bookmark that page or even share it with their friends. Make it easier for people to spread the word for you.