Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. There, now that we have got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let us move on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them. Being a beginner guide this will not be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path. Understanding what you are trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the "why" of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.
Why Are Links Important?
To put it simply: a link is a vote. Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site. Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. There, now that we have got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let us move on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them. Being a beginners guide this will not be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path. Understanding what you are trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the "why" of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.
Why Are Links Important?
To put it simply: a link is a vote. Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site. Admittedly there are a number of other factors but this is a beginners guide. Following the considerations above will insure that as you make each link decision – your odds of making the right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore them. Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned, but it will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less valuable links and thus need to build far more than following the right methods.
So far we have covered briefly the why of link building, now let us get into the real-life, here is-how-to-do-it side of things. Below I am going to cover three of my favorite link building tactics. These are tactics that apply to virtually every scenario. The number of ways to build links is only limited by your imagination, however, and this should not be viewed as a comprehensive list. This is, after all, a beginners guide and I am trying to list the tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.
Side Note: Reciprocal Link Building
I am not going to count this as one of my favorites and so it will not count as one of the three noted above and I will only touch on it briefly. There have been a number of assertions that reciprocal link building is dead. This is simply not the case. I have seen and competed against sites that were very successful with reciprocal links as their primary link source.
The problem with reciprocal links is not so much in their value which does seem to be a bit lower than non-reciprocal links however often more easily attained. No, my problem with reciprocal links is in the management. Unethical webmasters' removing links after you have put the link up to them, sites expiring and not being renewed, sites getting penalties of their own due to their bad tactics are all inconveniences the reciprocal link manager must deal with.
As an SEO company, a huge issue we faced was leaving our clients with this task after a campaign was over if they decided not to go on a maintenance package. Non-reciprocal links may be a bit harder to attain in some cases, however, that issue is much easier to overcome than the sum of all these issues.
Articles
If you are paying attention as you read this, you will probably have guessed that I am a fan of article writing as a link building method. You are an expert in your field. Who knows more about your business than you? So share. Writing an article may not be easy, but it is rewarding. If you can not think of a topic, think of what you get asked
Once the article is completed you need to get it syndicated. Using an article submission service such as Article Sender is a simple way to get your article out to a large number of publishers quickly. On top of this you would do well to seek out specific sites in your field using one or all of the major search engines to find highly relevant sites that accept articles and submit to them.
Directory Submissions
Directory submissions are likely the most painful of the link building tactics you will employ. Why? Because it is tedious and time-consuming work. To be done right directory submissions must be done manually. The titles and descriptions must be tailored to the specifications of the directory in question and often, you will have to decide if a review fee is worth it.
While there are a good many directories that accept free submissions there are also a large number that require a review fee. The fee can range from a few dollars to a few hundred. If you see that a directory has a low PageRank, is general in it is nature (i.e. it is not about your specific field) then it likely is not worth more than a couple dollars if that. If the site is strong, and strongly related to your site then it is obviously worth more.
There is no hard-and-fast set of rules for how much a listing is worth. I would recommend to start your hunt for directories (do not forget the topic and/or region specific ones), submit to all the free ones and make a list of all the ones that require a fee. After you have gotten a solid number in your "need to be paid list" you can get a general idea as to what is out there and what you can get and for how much. This will enable you to make solid choices knowing what all your options are.
Forum Posting
I just know I am going to get a couple comments and/or emails for listing this as a link building tactic, but if it is done right, there is nothing wrong with it. Forum and blog posting got a bad reputation as a link building tactic when it came under huge abuse by unethical webmasters spamming forums with useless garbage just for a link. They even went so far (and still do) as sending out spiders to automatically submit posts.
If you are seeking out forums related to your site, reading the threads and responding with solid advice or with questions and not just firing off some sales-pitch, then you are doing what you are supposed to be. Another perk to this is that, like articles, if you do this right, you are gong to see traffic as well and what more can you ask from a link building tactic than traffic as well as links.
Conclusion
Above we have covered the basics of link building. As I have noted repeatedly, once you hare done reading this and applying some of what you have read, you would do well to read other articles, forums and blogs. This is not a complete breakdown of everything link-related (that would be a full book) but it will keep you out of trouble and save you countless hours of wasted time getting poor links that have not held value since 2003.
Source From SEO News
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