SEO Demystified: Link Building

One of the most important factors in determining your ranking in search engines is the number and quality of in-bound links to your site. Link building can include directory submissions, advertising, even link exchanges. But the most effective long-term strategy is to simply create great content.

Search engines will spider or crawl your site more frequently and spider more pages if you have a lot of good links pointing to it.

Before we proceed further, I want to address reciprocal links vs in-bound links. From time to time, I will receive a form email from some entity that wants to exchange links — that is, they’ll link to us if we link to them. That simply will not help you and in some cases may even hinder your efforts to get better positioning in organic search results. As a rule, I always suggest that our clients turn this down unless they are exchanging links with strategic partners.

You should also be mindful where an in-bound link appears. Well placed links from authoritative sites will not only help with your page rank, but they will also bring in a steady stream of quality visitors to your site. That will, in the long run, result in more conversions than if you simply go after random links from anywhere.

Linking to keywords

In the best circumstances, you’ll be able to control where and how your in-bound links appear on a site. For example, in directories, you can be sure that you’re mapping your in-bound links to your keywords. However, that isn’t always the case. If sites find your content useful, they may simply refer to it with the domain name or perhaps some “click here” text. You cannot control that. But wherever possible, try to have the hypertext of the link contain some of your target keywords.

SEO consultants will have all sorts of techniques for accomplishing this. Often, they will submit content to article directories (ezinearticles.com, easyarticles.com, articledashboard.com, etc) with signature links back to target landing pages on the site. This not only promotes you as a subject-matter expert, but also provides in-bound links.

Bottom line…it takes time

As you discuss link building with your SEO consultant, they will likely tell you that it takes a while to build solid in-bound links. There are somewhat dubious shortcuts that you can take but in the end you will fare much better to build slowly and steadily. Next up…getting indexed.