Link Building 101

These days, inbound links or backlinks have assumed far greater importance in terms of where your website will rank in the search engines. Inbound links can be likened to votes for your website – the more votes you receive, the more popular your website and the higher it will be ranked in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

However the sheer number of votes or links to your website is only one part of the equation – unlike a democracy, all votes are not equal in the eyes of the search engines. One vote or backlink from a website with a page rank of 5 or 6 is worth more than hundreds of links from websites with page ranks of 0 and 1. This is due to the fact that high page rank websites pass on some of their link “juice” to the receiving website – adding more page rank value to the receiving website.

The third part of this link building process relates to the “anchor text” used by the linking websites. If the anchor text for the links is topic related, but not exactly the same for every link then the links will also be valued highly. For example, if your website was related to “dog training” and the anchor text links were say “dog training tips”, “successful dog training”, “dog training for owners” and etc., then the links would appear quite natural. On the other hand, if each and every link had the same anchor text say “dog training”, then these links would appear contrived or manufactured and would carry far less weight.

Reciprocal links are another form of building back links, whereby one website places its link in the other and vice versa. However, this method of linking is less effective in increasing a website’s rankings in the search engines.

One way links can be built by adopting some of the following techniques:

• Write and publish quality articles online.
• Write and publish press releases on the web.
• Write and update a relevant and optimized blog.
• Build one way links by using viral marketing, video blogging, social bookmarking, tagging, and other new media concepts.

In summary then, you can get one way links from various sites other websites such as related websites, press releases, blog posts, article directories, podcasts, social bookmarking websites, blog comments, web 2.0 social sites, videos and directories.

There’s no doubt that link building strategies will improve a website’s link popularity and search engine ranking, and one way link building can be one of the strongest weapons in your link building arsenal.