1 Dec, 2011  |  Written by  |  under Link Building
link building explained in detailsOnce you have spent time working on your very first website you will suddenly realize people aren’t magically flocking to it. You see the need to do more to bring in traffic. One of the very first things you will probably come across is link building. Let’s see just what link building can do and what it is.

A Link – This is simply a connector between two web pages. It is able to connect one of your articles on your site to a specific category or a home page. It can even connect that article with another article on that same site. These are known as ‘internal links’ because they connect pages within the same site.

There are also external links. These connect pages from one site to pages on another. For instance, if I write an article that I post in a directory, then I am connecting my article page listed on that directory to a page I have on my own site through that link.

Link Building – This is a process where you actively build more links that point back to your site pages. You can do this by writing good articles and then submitting them. That is how you are reading this article right now. Writing guest blogs is another way of obtaining a couple of links to your website.

Some other techniques are forum posting, directory submissions, social bookmarking, blog commenting, press releases, etc. You can find whole courses that teach the techniques for effective link building.

Why Link Building Is Important For Your SEO:

We spend a lot of time building links for one reason. This is how you create connection between the pages and the sites that will send visitors to our own sites.

The main reason we build links is for ranking well with search engines so we can get more organic traffic. Here is why building links is such a crucial part of Search Engine Optimization.

Your anchor text within a link (these are your keywords used for making a clickable link that is underlined in blue) is your second most crucial factor for getting ranked with the search engines. Your first on is your Title tag. When you combine the title tag with your backlinks you find they account for 80% of your ranking factors. When you make sure to use a proper title and work on building backlinks and a keyword saturated anchor text, you will be able to rank on the first page of Google results for almost any term. If your keywords have lots of competition then you may need more backlinks, but these things will work.

Go ahead and try it. Find yourself a long-tail keyword, then write an article about or post on a blog. Be sure to include the chosen keyword in your Title tag toward the front of it. Then you need to build some links to this page including your keywords in your anchor text. Most long-tail keywords only need 2 to 3 good backlinks for getting ranked on that much sought after ‘first page’ of the search engine results.

link building with the help of contentNews, press releases, articles distribution is one of the most effective and promising ways to get inbound one way links, but also it is one of the most labor-intensive ways. If you have a great site with high quality content you can negotiate with the owners of authoritative resources with high traffic within your niche about the publication of your materials, articles and news on them, not forgetting to include direct references to the source, links to your website with right keywords if possible, or simply plain url links.

Content distribution is especially effective in case of link building: search engines appreciate single one way links, surrounded by lots of text. This is a very important feature of “natural” links. It should also be noted that article placement (guest blogging) is a mutually beneficial process: you get a strong link to your site, your partner who has posted your article – a new page with quality content.

In order to gain a good effect from link building campaigns based on content distribution, you need to work hard. Firstly, the article must be really of high quality, interesting to the visitors of the sites you want to place it on. Secondly, the article must be unique, if you post the same article on several sites, without changing a single word, the effect will be small. Search engines tend not to keep duplicate content in their bases. Try to obey the rule: 1 article – 1 website. Thirdly, the process of finding quality sites to host your articles and agree with their administrators to deploy is not so simple and fast as you may assume. And also high quality and unique articles are not written in 5 minutes.

Therefore, as noted above, news, press releases, articles promotion is a very effective method to build one way links if you have a serious approach to it, but it is very laborious.

Unfortunately, there is clearly a trend of dumb article promotion. Article spinning, synonimizing and other grey techniques are of that kind. As a result you can find “article directories” which are practically not moderated, which accept any scraps of text that are no less than a certain amount of words. I have no doubts that search engines are paying attention to such “article directories” and are not giving them much credit.

where to find LE partnersIt’s not a secret now that high positions and good performance in search engines – it’s all about LINKS. If you have lots of links from quality websites pointing to you as “seo tips and tricks” you are much closer to rank well on this phrase than those who don’t.

There I need to mention that “quality websites” means that they are 1) relevant to your theme and 2) the main thing – are for people, not  just for linking.

So, lets start.

Link exchange can be automatic and manual. More information about all the types of link exchanges you can read in Wiki “Methods of website linking” article.

The most efficient one is manual link exchange, because it allows you select only high-quality and most relevant websites for your link and as a result don’t get in trouble with search engines.

In the article, this kind of exchange I’ll describe more precisely.

Also, link exchange can be two-way (reciprocal), three-way and four-way.

Reciprocal link exchange is when two websites share their reciprocal links. This scheme was very popular several years ago and was pretty effective at that time. Today reciprocal linking is much less effective, coz search engines can easily identify links of that LE-scheme and reduce their value (link juice).

Nowadays most effective schemes of exchange are three-way and four-way.

3-way exchange comes when one person have 2 websites of the same theme (#1 and #2), and there is another person who have only one website of the same subject. Then, the first party makes reference to the only website of his partner from his website #1, and his partner gives him a link to the website#2.

So, everybody now has one-way (non-reciprocal) link and the deal is mutually beneficial.

3 way link exchange

3 way link exchange

4-way exchange is when each of two sides has 2 websites, and each partner provides links to one site, and promotes his partner on the other site.

So, one side and his partner (the other side) in 3 way and 4 way exchanges receives one-way link, which is much more effective than reciprocal, coz it looks much more natural for search engines, it looks like a real vote, not just an arrangement (like reciprocal).

Where to find link exchange partners?

You can go the following ways:

1. Try to communicate with webmasters of websites of your niche you like and consider worth of exchange. Just send an e-mail with your LE-offer.

2. Search for partners to trade links on forums. Most popular forums for link exchange are:

Digital Point Forum

Site Point Forum

V7N Forum

3. Share links with your friends, colleagues, etc.

During a process of exchange you should pay attention to the following things:

* Field, theme of a site (is it relevant to your topic?)

* Rankings (try to find websites that have good rankings on their targeted keywords)

* PageRank of your partner’s website. The higher PR of a website is, the more weight will be given by its reference (link juice).

* Other important indicators characterizing quality of website – number of pages in Google index, Alexa rank, age of domainname, number of outbound links, etc.

* GEO affiliation of domainname (.com or .co.uk or .ca) and country hosting its IP. So, if you want to achieve high positions in google.ca (Canadian Google), it’s necessary to get as many links from sites with .ca or sites hosted on Canadian IP’s as you can.

These items will help you to understand how much weight can be brought by a reference (link) to your site. In other words, you can estimate link’s juice.

Be selective, and at the same time don’t be greedy for really good links!

Good luck to you! :)

P.S. The imposing performance graduates with my highlight.