The Art of Link Building

By obtaining inbound links from authority sites to your site, that are relevant, and valuable is a great way to improve your sites rankings in the SERPs. As I have said before just this one technique will not be enough to impact your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, there are many more pieces of the puzzle that you will have to work on as well. Don’t get me wrong though link building is a very valuable SEO tactic, and will certainly help your efforts if done correctly.
Links are quite often the most misunderstood task of SEO, they could very easily make the difference in ranking great or poorly even if you have great content on your site. For example if two websites were offering the same original, quality content they will be differentiated by inbound links, and to a lesser extent by their outbound links by the search engines.

Seeking Links

When you link to a site you are approving their content and basically saying that they have quality content that will benefit your visitors (customers). This is usually the reason sites link to one another, to provide their visitors with more quality content that will help them, which is great. The same goes for you and your web site, you should only link to quality relevant pages that will help your visitors.
When you are searching around the web for sites which you would like to link to yours, you should only consider sites that have relevant content which is worthy of being linked too. If you wouldn’t want to “waste” your time reading their content chances our that your customers won’t either, so steer clear of those sites.

Link Relevance

As briefly mentioned earlier in this post, when you are looking for inbound links the site you are hoping to get a link from should be relevant to your sites theme or at least it should be relevant to the content on that page you would like to link too. This same rule applies when you are considering linking to an external web site. The relevance between the sites is the key to credibility for both sites involved, and applies no matter which way the link is going (inbound or outbound).
I think the best way of doing this is to put yourself in your visitors shoes, instead of just thinking about getting a link. Think about if the visitors from either site will benefit from the link? Will the page on the other web site provide new and relevant content that the visitor may be interested in? To help illustrate this, from this website or post  I could link to a page on SEOmoz.org, which is a valuable SEO resource. This type of link may greatly help you my visitor in gaining more information about the topics you are already interested in. If you are already doing this on your site great keep up the good work, if not you should start it will only help you in the long run.

Link Quality vs. Quantity

I think this is the part where the most confusion of the whole link building process come in. Webmasters often naturally think that since one inbound link is good, twenty links are better, so 26,000 must be great! If all these links where equal, this might be good, but the truth is finding this many quality links that are relevant to your content could prove impossible.
So instead of making this mistake you as a webmaster will be much better off if you just focus on quality. Having a small number of inbound links from relevant sites, that have great reputations, will be far better than having a mountain of “junk” links. To take this a little further you should also not attempt to increase your inbound links artificially (link farms), this may work for a little while but after the search engines find you it won’t be pretty.

Web Neighborhoods

Search engines can differentiate and recognize “bad neighborhoods” and worthy web sites. You will want to keep away from these “bad neighborhoods”, you will be able to identify them because they are usually link exchanges which will do you no good if you list your site there, in fact it could hurt your rankings. These sites often try to get you to link there by providing you links from dozens, of sites if not more, and they tell you that this will boost your search rankings. These sites are usually nothing more than pages full of endless links pointing anywhere and everywhere (not good), and often lack any quality content. It gets worse as many of these sites are involved in some kind of shady enterprises. Once the search engines find this and identify these sites, they are penalized or sometimes even banned from search indexes all together, and if your site is associated with these neighborhoods it will reflect poorly on your website.
We’re in luck though because search engines can also identify good networking, and worthy websites. This type of neighborhood can be identified by quality and quantity of original content as well as the consistency of this content, the quality and quantity of inbound and outbound links, and the content refresh rate along with the age of the site (often older sites are considered more reliable because of their proven performance over time).
So to sum it up search engines often define the authority sites by the quality of inbound links that will set your site apart from the others, but you will also need outbound links to relative authority sites that will provide value to your visitors. By providing outbound links you are also sharing the goodness with others, it’s a win-win situation.

Legit Links

So I’m sure that you understand the basic fundamentals behind linking by now, and the value created with quality links. However some webmasters still try to game the system with how they achieve inbound links, some will use reciprocal linking but it won’t be of much use if those links aren’t relevant.
Others may try to use triangulation link exchange techniques, so the links will not appear to be reciprocal, but remember that search indexes are massive and will easily be able to pick up on this. As a side note if these links aren’t  from an authority site or relevant they will be of little value anyways.
Another useless “old school” trick some webmasters try to implement is added a bunch of links to their pages to try and build link credit. They will also use tricks to hide the links on the pages so their visitors will not see the useless links, but search engine spiders will quickly pick up on this and the page will be credited for what it is; junk.

What if Someone Tries to Sabotage Your Site?

Some of you may now be wondering, “what if on of my competitors hooks me up with a bad neighborhood?”. The truth is that as your site gets more popular it will receive links from bad neighborhoods, but as long as you have quality content and more inbound links from good sites then from bad sites your rank shouldn’t be affected. Search engines realize that this problem will occur over time even to good sites, so they will take this into consideration.
Well I hope this well help you in your link building quest, keep in mind though that this is by no means an all inclusive tutorial to link building. Rather it’s just a quick little guide to get you started on your way to understanding link building and finding better links for your website. If you have any farther questions you can leave them in a comment, in the forum, or shoot us an email.