Link Building
What exactly are links? What do they do and how do they help your website?
Links navigate the highway that is the World Wide Web. Without them it would be so much more difficult to navigate e.g. move from one page to another or from site to site. In order to find anything on the web, we’d be reduced to typing in the address (URL) for every single page that had information we wanted to find. Remember the last time you spent a lot more time than you intended hopping from one hyperlink to another? That’s how links work!
Links are used in many ways. Your site is submitted to a directory, a link is built. Someone trawls through the directory, finds your site, clicks on the link and lands on your site. You link to additional information that interests your visitor on your site or on another site and they follow the various links until they’re satisfied or dinner is ready!
Links are an acknowledgment of the value of the website, the page or the information it leads to. Simply put, if you like it, it may make sense to link to it and if others like what you have to offer, it will make sense for them to link to you. Word of mouth is often how links spread. You have something others want to know about (and perhaps link to), people spread the word using blogs, their websites, Facebook, Twitter, or a whole host of other options.
The fastest and easiest way to build links to your site is to have something interesting to link to. Create link-worthy content and people will want the pleasure of your company.
Besides being the means of navigating the Web, links show (or at least they should) the visitor and search engines what web pages are about even before they click on them. Unfortunately, a lack of imagination often uses “click here” as the link. That tells you nothing about why you (or the search engine) should click, it just tells you what to do unless you read everything around the link. And, that’s asking a lot of people who generally don’t read every word on any page.
There are several types of links and each have their value so it is imperative that you decide what you want to accomplish by using one-way, reciprocal or multi-way links. A linking strategy appropriately using all three to gain the best results can be put together by a person or company well-versed in SEO techniques.
The best strategy for your website gathering useful links is to create a helpful, informative, educational website that others consider valuable. However that takes time so for a more proactive marketing strategy, there are lots of options to purchase one-way links. Search engines, in particular Google, frown on purchased links because many are not as relevant as they might be and are often seen as ‘forced’, they prefer links that are ‘naturally’ obtained.
Links should be an integral part of your SEO, even though not every link will provide the value you are looking for. So think outside the box for getting links – be aware that search engines will detect links purchased from brokers and such a purchase will not do your ranking any good. A one-on-one purchased link might just fly under the radar of the search engine but any purchasing of links comes with a certain amount of risk attached.
Google has another weapon in its arsenal for detecting the exploitation of glitches and holes which may have been put to use by web developers. Their latest invention, Google Caffeine was released in early 2010 and aims to track down sites trying to beat the system and the competition by using misleading reciprocal links instead of doing ‘natural’ link building.
Google Caffeine certainly isn’t intended to penalise websites that use a link building strategy which includes paid and reciprocal links. Google is, however, using Caffeine to clean up the tactics used by certain SEO practitioners - rewarding those who do link building properly while penalising those who try to cheat.
Although this article has talked primarily about external links to and from websites, don’t forget the importance of using internal links to help visitors navigate your site, find related information and companion products. Use of keywords in your internal links, “keyword juice” for search engines, inaccessible content, session ID’s, directory structure, site maps and so on are all part of the discussion about internal links but those are issues for another article.
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