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How to Build Effective Links

Written by: Dan Goldstein

Article Overview: The basics of an effective link building campaign. Using directories, articles, blogs and more. Also, how to make your link building campaign appear natural.

How to Build Effective Links

Today, all the SEO specialists talk about is link building. But what does it really mean and how do you do it effectively.

In very basic terms, link building is the strategic process of getting other websites and blogs to vote for your website or specific pages of your website. If you can convince authoritative websites to link to your website (this is known as a backlink), the search engines perceive that your site (or at least the pages that are linked to) are more valuable, hence they are more likely to rank them higher in their index.

There is a debate between SEO experts as to whether your site will appear more credible if it has a greater quantity of backlinks vs. a smaller number of high quality links. The consensus is that a few links from higher quality (authoritative websites) will have a greater impact than many links from low quality websites. This seems to be more true on Google than MSN, which seems to give a high value to the raw number of backlinks.

So how do you get backlinks? There are several easy options:

1. Register your site on directories. Obviously, higher quality, human edited directories like directory.yahoo.com and www.dmoz.org are worth a lot. However, there are many many directories on the web and, in very general terms, a listing on most of them will increase your website's credibility and, possibly your position on the search engine results.

As noted above, not all directory listings have the same value. You definitely should target human edited directories like Yahoo and DMOZ, but don't stop there. In our experience, most directories that require payment for inclusion have value. It is very important to look for directories of local businesses as well as they tend to have value - at least when you are trying to promote the website of a local business.

2. Write articles. The more often (and the more places) you publish articles on your area of expertise, the better. Each article will give you credit as the author and link back to your website. In many cases, you can also including links to internal pages of your website.

3. Write blogs. If you have a blog, it is a great place to talk about your expertise and link to specific pages on your website. In some cases, you can post articles on other people's blogs with links back to your website.

4. Try to get listed in the websites of local organizations that you belong to or charitable organizations that you give to. Ask for a listing with a link to your website.

5. Contact owners of other websites that deal with subjects related to your expertise. Ask them to link to your website or to specific pages of your website.

6. Contact your friends and colleagues and ask them to link back to your website. Many of them will. In some cases, you will have to provide a link to their website in exchange. Don't rely too heavily on straight link exchanges, however, as the search engines may see this as a link building scheme and discount its value.

7. Pay for links. This is very controversial and there are several businesses out there that are in this business. It is best to do it on your own and very quietly. You do not want links to appear to be paid for or they will appear to the search engines as paid ads and not have any SEO value. I will discuss this topic in much more detail in a future article.

8. Be careful that you don't trade links with "link farms". More about this in future articles too.

OK, let's say you have an opportunity to get a link back to your website. How do you do it? Of course, the best way is to hyperlink actual text that is descriptive of the page that you want to link to. So, for example, if I wanted to link to http://www.ppl-law.com/, I would hyperlink the following words "Philadelphia personal injury lawyers." The words that are hyperlinked are known as "anchor text". Sometimes you can't actually hyperlink the specific words that you want to use. In that case, it is OK to have those words near the actual link even if they are not used as anchor text.

Another thing to consider is that you should not just link to the home page of the website you want to promote. It really helps to link into the internal pages. So to use the same target website, you might want to hyperlink the words "Philadelphia medical malpractice lawyers" to http://www.ppl-law.com/medical_malpractice.html (the medical malpractice page of the website).

Don't just start a link building campaign because I say to do it. Think about why you are doing it. Pretend that SEO doesn't exist. On a perfect World Wide Web, other website owners would naturally want to link to your site if it contains great information that they believe would benefit their readers. The website owners who link to you are essentially voting for your site as a credible resource on the specific subject that it covers.

It is also important to consider that organic links don't all happen at once. If you do want to build links, build them gradually to more closely mimic the way organic links would develop.

There is a lot more to learn about link building, but this is a start.

Related Articles
  Why Backlink Building is Important for your Online Business
  Internet Marketing Tips – Back Link Building Strategies
  Link Building Methods Types of Links
  SEO Link Building Explained
  How to Use Link Building Packages Effectively

Article Tags: link building, link building, search engine, search engines, search engines, SEO, Yahoo



Related Forum Posts
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
Re: Great start, but no finish - My advise is FOCUS on your business. Focusing is the main factor to succeed on business. If you have a great idea, then follow it only, don't look anywhere else. It is especially essential in an online business. Because there are a lot of mind blowing sales letters promising millions dolllars or overnight success, people find it difficult to concentrate on one business and they lose their energy. Concept is simple. 1- Have a good idea; 2- Build your business on it; 3- Monetize your business; 4- Promote it; 5- Build list of responsive customers; 6- Maintain You Business. Focusing and not fearing from competition (instead you can learn from competitiors) are main tips of billionaires ,BTW. Orxan
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash
Re: How to do Link Building? - Be diligent. Build blogs.Pay attention to the contents.
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":1jr37kqx]There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash[/quote:1jr37kqx] Hi Jeff, Thanks for adding to the list. I have one question, though. How would one implement Session IDs for a URL, and what benefit would come from doing so?


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