If you would like your website to rank highly in the major search engines then link building should be an essential ingredient in your SEO plan. The problem is how do you go about getting those coveted links back to your website? Well let’s get started right now by covering some of the basic link building methods. However keep in mind that this is and will be a beginners guide and that there is still much more to learn about building links to your web site, but this will definitely get you started down the right path.
Why are links important?
To simplify things, you can think of the web as a popularity contest and links back to your web site count as a vote or a fan of yours. Thus when search engines find links back to your site they read this as your site being more popular and your rankings increase. It’s important to remember that while getting links back to your site is good they are not all created equally, there are many reasons why this is the case.
Not all links are created equally
This is where you have to start thinking a little differently from the popularity contest model. In a popularity contest the more votes you get the better your chances of winning, however when it comes to gaining links for your website is important to consider many other factors that will affect your sites rankings. Here are some of the factors that will affect the value of the links you achieve for your website:
- Anchor text: This is the actual text that is used to link back to your site, and it’s very important that you know how to properly use it. You should include your keywords in the text that will link back to you or if possible use the exact key phrase that you are trying to rank for. This is not always possible in every case though, you should always consider the visitor first, if the text doesn’t make sense there don’t use it everything should flow naturally. One more important consideration that I would like to touch on concerning anchor text is that you should not make all of them exactly the same, it’s all about making things look natural.
- Position: When looking to get a link from another page you should also consider where it will be located on the page, as this will affect the value of the link. Depending on where the link will be located determines how much value will be given to the link, the higher up on the page the better, but if it’s in amongst a list of other links the less value it will receive. Some of the best links you will be able to get will be located in the body of the content itself. Something else you should also take into consideration is how many other links are on this same page the more links the less value that is given to each one.
- Relevance: This may be the most important factor to consider when looking for sites to link back to yours. If you have a site about ninjas you shouldn’t go looking to get links from a site about flowers. One of the big reasons why this matters so much is that the search engines use this to help determine what your page is all about and if it’s see this it might get a little confused about what is going on there.
- The strength of the page: The strength of the website pointing at yours provides a significant role when it comes to determining how much value a link will have for your website. One of the common ways of finding the strength of page is looking at the PageRank, however overtime this is being less of a determining factor when searching for links. However you may still use it just as a quick reference guide when hunting down links.
While there are many other factors to consider when looking for links these will get you started in the right direction and significantly increase your chances of gaining valuable links. If you don’t follow these basic concepts your site won’t necessarily get banned from search engine indexes, however the time you spend building links will have substantially less impact on your ranking within the search engines.
Alright now let’s get down to the nitty gritty and discuss how to go about getting some links back to your site. In this post I’ll only be covering some of the basic methods, but there are many more you could chose to utilize. The only limitation when it comes to link building is your own imagination, so once you get some of the basic concepts under your belt go ahead and start thinking of some creative ideas for gaining links. The methods that I am about to cover here are excellent tactics that can be utilized for a great number of sites.
Articles
This is a great way to get links back to your site, you can write an article include a link back to your site and then start distributing them to other sites. This method has two great affects the first one of course gaining a valuable backlink and the second is that you may even gain a source of highly targeted traffic to your site.
You are an expert in your field so you are highly qualified to write and inform others of your topic. If you happen to have trouble thinking of a topic to write about you can just do a quick search around either in forums or question and answers sites. When you find a common question being asked over and over again you know that you have found a good topic to write an article about. While writing articles may not be easy it is very rewarding, in the fact that you inform others of information they would like to know and you also get a link back to your site.
There are a couple of method to go about getting your article syndicated. You can choose to use an article submission service that will blast your article out to a large number of article publishing sites very quickly or you can seek out sites that are highly targeted to your niche and submit it there. I would highly encourage you to do the later as this will count as a more valuable link for your site.
Directory submissions
This is a great link building tactic you will be able to get some great highly targeted backlinks, however to be done right you will need to devote a lot of time. You shouldn’t use one of the automated directory submission services because each directory will have their own specifications on how the title and description should be setup.
Some directories may also require you to pay a review fee, this has a wide range from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. You will have to decide whether or not to pay these fees, sometimes it will be worth having the link back to your site and other times it won’t do you any good what so ever.
Of course they are some of the bigger more popular directories that are out there including BOTW, DMOZ, and Yahoo!, but you should also hunt for some of the more targeted smaller directories. You could start your search for directories that or related to your niche and/or your region, I would suggest that you submit your site to the free ones and just make a list of the paid ones at first. Later after you have a complete list you can go back and decide which if any of these will help your site the most and make the decision then whether or not to pay the review fee.
Forum Posting
If this is done right it can be used as a great link building tactic. Over the years it has received a bad reputation thanks to unethical webmasters that abused this by spamming the forums with links. Some webmasters still do spam the forums to get links, and some may even use spiders to crawl and automatically post links in them.
For this to be done right you should actually participate in the forum community and answer questions that will help others, rather than just posting sales material and a link back to your site. To get the links, many forums will allow you to include a link in your signature or in your profile that goes back to your website, and if you are in a forum that is related to your site this will be a great targeted backlink.
Well I think that about covers it for the basics of link building if you have anything else you would like to add feel free to leave it in the comments below or you can email me your thoughts. Remember that this is just a beginners guide and there is much more you can learn about building valuable links to your website, but this should hopefully help you on your way to building better links.