Thursday, November 19, 2009

Link Building

After you have created a good website for your target audience, it is crucial to build a network of incoming links that point to your website.

Link building means actively recruiting other webmasters to link to your website.

Why is this so important? Basically, search engines register an incoming link from another website as a "vote" for your website, one that is saying "that site is good". If you want to be found as #1 on Google for a competitive search term, you need other sites voting for you. However, it is not as simple as that.

Search engines distinguish incoming links through a variety of factors, amongst them:
  • link relevancy
  • page importance
  • link direction


Link Relevancy
A link to your site is relevant if the page that is linking to your page features a very similar, or even better, the same general topic as that of your page that is being linked to. In other words, a link from somebody's web page that reviews Honda Civic used cars to your page is good and relevant if your site deals with used cars and your page features a used Honda Civic that is for sale, whereas it would be nearly useless if your page is about ice cream recipes.

Remember that it is also important for the incoming link to display relevant "anchor text", i.e. the link text. Click here or www.webopt.info is bad anchor text, whereas SEO in easy steps is good anchor text for a Web Optimization website. If the incoming link is an image link, it is important that the "alt" tag of the image reads relevant text.


Page Importance
Page importance is key. It is absolutely crucial for your successful link building strategy to realize that one single link from an important website might be more powerful than 100 links from very unimportant websites.

How is this importance measured? It differs. Google, for example, uses the Pagerank system, which is calculated using complex formulas. In general, a page is deemed more important if it has lots of other sites linking to it, and much more so if those sites are "important" sites, or sites with high Pagerank.

Look at it this way: by acquiring incoming links from relevant and important websites, you are increasing your own page importance. And a "vote" from important websites weighs much heavier than votes from low-pagerank sites.


Link Direction
It also matters which direction the link is going, and how many outgoing links are found on the linking page.

There are one-way links, which point to your page without you providing a back-link. One-way links are good to have. They mean much.

Two-way links are easier to acquire ("I'll link to you, if you link to me"), and are not as powerful as one-way links, because this is more like a link exchange. However, if this is the only way you can get a link from another website, go for it. Two-way links are still good for you, provided they are relevant.

Also note that a page that links to only 5 other external websites, one of which is yours, is very good to have. However, that same link becomes much less powerful if the page is filled with hundreds of outgoing external links.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for your support for Link building information
    Search engines provide higher page ranking to natural links.

    ReplyDelete
  2. it's nice
    links building is an outcome of informative and rich content posted n your websites.

    ReplyDelete