What is Link Building?
If you are in online business, you probably know that the success of
your business in a great extent depends on your website position in
search engines. The closer your link to the top of search results page is,
the more visitors will click on it. Thus, for webmasters, it is important
to optimize their websites for search engines and get as higher rank for
their pages as possible.
Search engine optimization is the process of taking steps with your
website to make it highly ranked by the search engines for your desired
search terms.
The key element in getting a higher page rank is link building. Building
high-quality links to your website that appear natural to search engines
is one and most important step towards increasing your page rank.
Why Are Links So Important For Your Online Success?
Here are two main reasons:
1) Links make your website get indexed by search engines so they begin
ranking your pages for target keywords. The higher rank in search
engines you have, the more visitors (and sales) you’ll get.
2) Links are used by search engines to determine how relevant your
web page is to search terms. By building links from relevant websites,
you ensure that your web page gets indexed and ranked by search
engines accordingly.
Link Basics
Before we get down immediately into link building strategies, let’s look
into link basics and define some most important linking concepts...
Link Designing
Typically a link consists of two parts:
1) URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This is the web address of the site
your link points to.
2) Anchor text. This is the visible text of the link.
Inbound and Outbound Links
An inbound link is a link that points to your web page from a different
page hosted on someone else’s website. An outbound link is located on
your website and points to someone else’s page.
One Way and Reciprocal Links
One way link is a link that points from one web page to a page on
someone else’s website. On the picture below there is a one way link
between Page 1 and Page 2.
http://site1.com/page1.html http://site2.com/page2.html
------------->
Sometimes webmasters can agree to exchange links with each other.
Those links are called reciprocal. The picture below shows the
reciprocal links between Page 1 and Page 2.
------------->
http://site1.com/page1.html http://site2.com/page2.html
<------------- One way links have become more valuable than reciprocal links because the search engines “guess” about the secret agreement between the webmasters to exchange the links and can often discount reciprocal links in some degree. However, the reciprocal links can still be helpful if they are from most important pages.
Link Popularity and Link Reputation
When another website links to your web page, this will be used by
search engines to vote for your website. Since search engines believe
that some links are more important than others, you’ll need to
understand the concepts of Link Popularity and Link Reputation in
order to build a natural looking link portfolio for your website.
Link Popularity is the quantity of links pointing to your web page from
other sites. It can also be determined as PageRank passed to your web
page.
Some time ago, search engines ranked web pages depending on the
number of links pointing to them. It was thought that good pages
attracted more links.
Nowadays it is changed. Search engines don’t rely on the pure link
popularity anymore. They evaluate links based on their importance. To
establish your web page as important, you can:
1. Get a lot of links from other pages
2. Get several links from already important pages
3. Use both 1 and 2 methods.
However, a few links from other important pages is the most effective
way to get a higher page rank because the pages linked from important
pages are themselves considered to be important (of course, the more
links from important pages you’ll have, the better). Just a few links
from important pages can do more good than a ton of links from
unimportant sites.
Link Reputation is connected with the type of keywords you used in
your anchor text. It is used to determine relevance for certain search
terms in the search engines.
So, you’ll have two tasks to accomplish for a successful link building
strategy:
1) get as many links from important pages as possible,
and
2) build relevance between your anchor text and target keywords
phrases used in search engines.
Page Rank and Google Toolbar
The PageRank feature on the Google toolbar lets you know how
important Google considers the page to be. When installed, the Google
toolbar will show you the rank of every page you visit. Many experts
consider the PageRank to be the most important factor in establishing
the relevance of your web page for each particular search phrase typed
into the Google search box.
