Link Building

Link building is one of the first tasks thrust upon marketers new to the web. It is critical to the success of businesses of all sizes. The marketer’s focus must be to improve their ability to drive the traffic. Links create credibility, visibility & direction for the www’s audience.

Importance of Links

Link building efforts in the SEO world are done to improve a site’s search engine rankings. Some methods are:-

Gaining Direct Traffic

Spiderability is not the only focus of our website. Web users visiting sites can and (hopefully) do click on those links, generating direct traffic

Visibility, Branding & Influence

By participating in the community around our niche and building content worthy of links and discussion within said community,

Improves Trust from Search Engines

Trusted domains have proven over time (ironically, through the acquisition of thousands of trusted links) to be worthwhile and reliable sources of quality information about their given subject matter.

Links as Votes

A link to a particular page is equivalent to a vote by the linking page for the linked-to page. Links from web pages with high PageRank would be more valuable than links from low PageRank pages.

Properties of Link Building

Structural characteristics of links that can help make them most effective:

• Anchor text

Anchor text is the actual text that visitors click on to follow a link

• Link location

Where in a site’s page structure our link is found: shallow or deep.Shallow links are links to your site’s homepage or top-level category pages. Deep links, on the other hand, are links to more specific pages such as individual articles, blog posts, tools or other content.

• Link intention

Engines have gotten better and more efficient at measuring the  quality and intention of link patterns.

Art & Science of Direct Link Acquisition

Asking for Links: As with any human interaction, spending some time participating in blogs and forums on sites that could help us.

Offering Compensation: Sometimes we may ask for a link and may receive a convoluted set of conditions, reciprocations and other such hullabaloo in response.

Targeting Content: create some content on our site that we think would be of interest to the site we want a link from.

Social Media Link Building

Sites where you build a profile, page, comment in forums or otherwise interact in a way that allows for inclusion of information about your site and (more importantly) links to yourself are sprouting up like weeds all over the web. They can provide good exposure and even the occasional, valuable link.

Link Baiting

Link baiting is the concept of creating content primarily for the purpose of gaining links. Large social media are widely read by tech-savvy audiences that tend to be more than willing to give out links to content they find valuable, interesting or amusing. Any potentially viral content can make for good link bait.

Some other Relevant Methods

• Spin Articles: Practice of using the same article multiple times, but swapping out keywords or sentences to make unique articles
• Submit articles to article syndication sites
• Content building for links
• Content Sharing
• Press Release
• Pay-Per-Click (PCC)