The Art of Link Building

Building links is not only challenging but it is an art form that can lead to dramatic results for your website ranking.  The art of building links is not an exact science, far from it.  As a goal, you should try to get as many relevant links as needed for your website.  There are a lot of factor that go into optimizating a website for top results, and none more important that incoming links to your website.

Why are links so important?

Links to your website are viewed by the search engines as the most important factor in ranking a website.  They reason that they are important is based in two main reasons.  The first is that when a third party website links to your website, the search engines view that as an honest vote for your website.  Second, is based in the quality of the website linking to you.  Quality is commonly viewed as a link from a relevant website that is within your industry or at least from a webpage that has relevant content, relevant link text. 

• Try to obtain links from websites within your industry or discussing content related to your website.
• If possible, request that the link text pointing to your website contains relevant terms.  So, if you are trying to get a link to your homepage and your sell widgets, try to get the link to say "Buy widgets here", "Get your widgets here", or simply "widgets".  The more specific you can be the better chance you will have to get ranking for your website.
• Obtain links from high quality sites.  All links are not created equal, and getting a link from a high quality website within your industry can be very valuable.
• Linking with your competitors is commonly thought of as being a good thing to do.  It helps to define your website as being in the same industry as your competitors.  Now, you don't need to put a competitors link on your homepage, but you can do it in a more discrete manner, like on a links referral page.

Requesting Links to your website

Getting people to link to your website can be challenging and to do it successfully you will need to have a convincing reason for the website to link to you.  The website that links to you will commonly be looking to get something in return for linking to you.  In many cases this will be a reciprocal link to the second website.  Reciprocal linking is very common and many websites do this.  This is a less powerful form of linking as the engines view this as an agreed link. 

The best type of link is a one-way link to your website.  This means that the website is linking to you for one of a couple of reasons.

• You have paid them to link to you.
• They honestly like your website and just want to link to you.
• You have a compellling reason for them to link to you?
• You have a reciprocal linking agreement with them.

Obtaining 1 way votes to your website

Getting a 1-way vote to your website is the best type of link to get to your website.  There are many ways to do this, and some of them are listed above.  The best way to do this is to provide relevant and meaningful content to your website.  This is how the search engines have been designed to work.  The engines view it as a real vote to your website when a website links to you.

A great way to get people to link to you without even asking for link is to provide a compelling reason to get that vote.  For example, if you really liked the information on this website, you could put a link on your webiste saying that this is the place that helped you to learn about SEO.  So, developing a compelling reason to get people to link to you is not easy.  You will need to think about providing useful information, a great image for your industry, etc.  If you are able to think of a compelling reason, you will be able to be successful in getting links to your website.

What makes a good website link?

A good link is comprised of three things.  It must first have a good link text the is appropriate for the landing page. The link text that you use within your hyperlink must be relevant to the landing page.  If your landing page is about "Blue widgets" then a very appropriate link text would be exactly that, about "Blue Widgets".  So, the link text could read "Blue Widgets" and the landing page, should have the phrase "Blue Widgets" somewhere on it.

Next, you should make sure that the page referring a link to you is relevant to your website.  Historically, many spammers would try to get as many links as possible to a website from anywhere.  The days of this are long gone, as the search engines now take into account the relevance and weighting of the website linking to you.

Lastly, the appropriate landing page should be selected for your hyperlink.  This means that if your obtaining a link for "Blue Widgets", then you should attempt to obtain hyperlinks to a page that you have written about "Blue Widgets".  Now with that said, it is important to make sure that you read our section about navigation and keyword analysis.  Becuase it may make sense to send the link directly to your homepage if the only think that you sell are "Blue Widgets".  The reason for this is that yoru hompage often has the best chances for ranking in the search engines.

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