Link Building
What is Link Building?
Link building is an important aspect of any SEO strategy. It is a vital activity since search engines sometimes judge the popularity of your website from the number of links that point to it. Simply stated, your websites are reckoned as good ones by the search engines if more and more websites offer a link to your website. Link popularity gels well with the search engine algorithms and spiders give due consideration to it while assigning your website a page rank. As a matter of fact, search engines consider Link Popularity as a kind of validation of the fact that your website is good.
However, search engines give due consideration to the popularity and quality of the website that carries your links. Remember, no matter how clever you are, the search engines are smart enough to detect any link spamming attempted by you. The bottom line is that it’s not just the number of links, but the qualitative worth of the links, the search engines are concerned with.
Importance of Link Building
The role and importance of Link Building in fetching your websites the top page ranks is a debatable issue among the SEO fraternity. However, if done judiciously, Link Building is something you have nothing to lose from. In fact, Google recognizes a link from page A to page B as a vote for Page B, by page A. But, again as mentioned above, it’s not just the number of votes, but the weightage of each vote that’s important for Google. Higher the relevance, compatibility and the popularity of the websites linking to your website, more would be the weightage your link gets.
Thus, Link Building is not an absolute factor in itself that will decide your websites’ ranks. It’s more of a genial contributor to the whole SEO process, one that may help in getting you a higher rank.
How does Link Building help?
Link Building has its own advantages. The prime advantage is that it can enable your website to get higher page ranks because all the search engines give it some consideration (as per their respective algorithms) while deciding the page ranks of your websites. Link Building also brings more traffic to your website. In fact, Link Building can provide a source of steady traffic to your websites and that too for a long period of time.
Furthermore, your having links on different websites indicates that your websites are being frequently indexed by the search engines.
Correlation between Link Popularity and Google Page Rank
Google does not decide the page rank of a website on the basis of the density of the in-bound links, as is commonly perceived. Instead, page rank of a website is decided on the basis of the Page Ranks of the pages that link to it. This means, their respective page ranks are decided on the basis of the page ranks of the pages that link to them. This is how ranking through web linking works.
Ways & Means to Increase Link Popularity
There’s a plethora of different ways that play a vital role in increasing the Link Popularity. Some of these are as follows:
Reciprocal Links - This is one of the most popular ways to increase Link Popularity. It works on a simple give and take theory wherein you offer links to the other relevant websites and they return the favor by adding your link to their websites. This enables both the websites to get more target traffic. As stated earlier, it also enhances your website’s chances to be placed higher on the search engines’ list.
Submissions to Directories - It’s a well-known fact that linking with the major directories like Yahoo can deliver you good results. So you must ensure that you are linked to the major directories as well as to the smaller directories, which are suitable for your purposes.
Affiliate Program - Subscribing to the affiliate programs also helps a great deal in improving your Link Popularity. Do ensure that the affiliate links to your website refer directly to the actual page of your website.
Compatibility - Blind link exchanges will do you no good. Always endeavor to link with the websites that exhibit some kind of compatibility to the products/services you are offering. There is no point linking to a website dealing in apparels, if television is the product you wish to sell through your website.
Relevance - Relevance of subject and content is very important for your Link Building campaigns to be a success. More and more websites would like to offer you a link if your portal has a well-defined subject and well written, relevant content.
Create Keyword rich content - Your content needs to be quality content enriched with appropriate keywords. Keyword rich content will not only fetch you more target traffic via your link exchange partners, but will also ensure that the search engine spiders your link, increasing the chances of your website getting a better page rank.
Meaningful Articles - Website owners are always on the look out for informative articles, analysis, write-ups, and tutorials. You can really make other websites want to offer you links by consistently coming up with exhaustive, meaningful articles, reviews, and critiques.
Precise Anchor Text - The hyperlinked text or the text that is used in the hyperlink when linking to a web page is called Anchor Text. It is very imperative to use the precise keywords in the Anchor Text, as it represents the content of the linking page. The right keywords used in the Anchor Text can do the trick for your search engine rankings. This is because most of the search engines including Google give due importance to this aspect of websites while awarding page ranks.
Message Boards - Posting to the message boards can also enhance Link Popularity. You can do so by posting your signed messages. It is important that you keep a record of all your messages intact as static HTML pages.
Quality not Quantity Matters - Don’t go for mindless, excessive linking. Search engines like Google value the links that are relevant. Countless irrelevant links don’t find any favor with the search engine crawlers. Rather, it mars your chances to get a high page rank. So, always make judicious submissions.
Beware of Free For All (FFA) pages - Free for All (FFA) Links don’t give you what they promise. These submission firms make mass submissions, which don’t serve your purpose. Their hidden objective is to gather more and more email addresses to enable them to send junk emails.
Link to the Indexed websites - For your Link Popularity to actually escalate, it’s very important that you link to the websites that have been indexed by all the search engines This will make your website available to the different search engines, thus giving it a higher page rank.
Exhaustively research your prospective partners - Try to collect information about your prospective link partners and analyze the various facts and figures. All this will help you take the right decision and choose the right linking partner.
Robots.txt file - Check out the robots.txt file. This as the name suggests is a plain text file. It implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol by means of which a Webmaster clearly demarcates his boundaries for the search engine robots i.e. robots.txt defines the No Entry zone for the robots. Thus, the robots cannot view the pages the Webmaster doesn’t want them to see. So, if you link to the pages that fall under this No Entry zone, your linking exercise will be useless.
Watch out for Re-directed Pages, Dynamic Link Pages, Flash Link Pages - You must apprise yourself of this all-important aspect of the Link Popularity. Never link to the pages that are re-directed to one of the pages of your link exchange partner, before taking the user to your web page. Furthermore, you must check that the pages you link to are not flash generated pages because the search engines can’t read flash web pages. Last but not least, beware of dynamically generated pages as search engines can take a lot of time to index such pages.
It is worth keeping these things in mind to ensure your Link Popularity campaigns get you good results.
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