Papers & Articles

25/05/2007  |  Link Building and Best Practice

Link Building is considered to be one of the most effective SEO techniques. If you haven’t done any link building yet, you should consider doing some right now or contact a SEO company that offer Link building services.

Just a quick note about how search engines work first. For a search query entered into the search engine, the algorithm uses rules to identify the most relevant pages, based on the page’s text content and its context (which can be indicated by links from other pages and sites). So essentially inbound links act as a vote to your website.

There are different ways of doing link building but not all are good so you have to be very careful. Below are the link building practices that are considered to be among the best.

Link Directories.
Although link directories are not as effective as they used to be, many can still be considered quality links such as Dmoz and Jayde and are very cost effective. But not all directories are created equal. There are very few directories left on the web that are still worth submitting to.

Article and News Submission
The good thing about good article sites or news sites is that their article pages often rank highly and send highly qualified traffic, so as well as getting inbound links from them you will often have qualified traffic click through to your site. So writing an article and submitting it to this kind of website is recommended.

Link Baiting
Link baiting is where the quality of your content is useful or entertaining enough that people will want to link to it, thus improving your number of inbound links and your position in the search engine results pages. It can be done through your website’s content as well as through your blog.

Link Exchange
Link exchange with the wrong sort of site can be bad for your website and get you banned from Google so be careful with this strategy. If you use link exchanges, you have to be very selective.

Forums and Blogs
Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and visit your site, link to your site, and/or buy your products. You can also post comments in blogs with a link back to your website.

To conclude remember that Inbound links (one-way text links) using good anchor text are your goal from an SEO perspective. It is much better to have 10 inbound links from related topic sites with a PR of zero, than 100 inbound links from unrelated, PR8 sites. And think long-term when building links, as it takes time to achieve real benefits.