Effective Link Building Practices

Link building is the process of building backlinks to your site. The more backlinks (links from other sites to your site) a site has, the higher it ranks on the search engines. Link building therefore is a mission of all money making webmasters.

Link building methods have changed from time to time and a specific method that worked yesterday may not work today. This is due to changes in the industry over time and in some cases extreme abuse. If a specific link building method has been abused too much, then that method will not work anymore.

It is therefore very important to know which link building method works today so that you can spend your time in a most productive way.

There are many link building methods out there today that work with some working better than others. Below are some of the today’s popular links building methods:

Article Submission. If you are reading this article, then you know that you can publish your own article in article directories. Not only do you gain backlinks to your site from your published articles (see bottom of this article), you will get some traffic as a bonus. Think of you reading this article. There might be many reading your published articles as well.

Directory Submission. Directory submission used to work lot better before, but it is still a popular link building method that still works if done properly. How many directories are out there as of this date is anyone’s guess but one thing is certain: that most of the directories aren’t worth submitting to. Google considers a Yahoo Directory link as a quality backlink so if you can afford and justify the cost, it is worth submitting to Yahoo Directory.

Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking worked like charm only a few months ago. If bookmarked on authority and quality bookmarking sites like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, etc, then you can still make good use of social bookmarking. Other than backlinks, social bookmarking also offers you some bonus traffic depending on where you submit to. If you can manage to put together or collect a good bookmarking site list, then social bookmarking can still be a useful link building method.

Blog Commenting. This is a link building method where lots of spamming has already been done so to make the best of it, you need to work a little harder here. It is best to find quality blogs related to your own category and make on-topic relevant comments. Not only do your comments add value to the blogpost, you now have a greater chance of getting your comment approved and your comments have greater chance of staying on those blogposts.

Press Releases. Submitting to press release sites can get you some backlinks as well. It is however hard to put together a list of good press release sites that are worth submitting to. If a good list can be managed, then this method can offer some quality relevant backlinks as well.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Pages. Social media and Web 2.0 links are very popular these days because they work great. They offer quality, relevant contextual backlinks that Google and other major search engines love. There are lots of other link building methods out there, but if you can utilize the above ones to their fullest potential, there is no need for any other methods.

Social Bookmarking: Indexing – Link Building Methods

Social bookmarking is tagging a website and saving it for later. Instead of saving them to your web browser, you are saving them to the web. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and because your bookmarks are online, you can easily share them with friends; unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. It can also be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Social bookmarking has many advantages over the search engines. The good thing about the search engines is that you can find almost anything at a single social bookmarking site. Instead of going into a search engine, typing something in, and then searching for that needle in a haystack, you can quickly narrow down the items to what you are looking for. Bookmarking websites, however will not list each and everything. They will only be listing the websites which have been viewed and then liked by the users. This means that only quality websites will be available in the social networking website’s directory. The search engines list everything under the particular topic and this things works against them. The people who are looking to save time and want to find the useful thing without trying many websites, always prefer online bookmarks. They get what is good only.

On the otherhand, the down sideof social bookmarking is the lack of audience. The search engines are used by everyone around the world. There are 3 or 4 dominant engines and all you will have to do is to optimize the website for those search engines. But if you are looking to promote your website using the bookmarking websites, you will never get that huge audience just by using them. There are various popular websites and you will have to use all of them in order to get a good return rate.

But there is more to it than just that. In the world of social bookmarking, in most cases web site social bookmarking links and listings are public listings. Therefore, other people will see and click on these links if the social bookmarking sites are receiving any volume of traffic. Additionally, some of the better social bookmarking sites have high Google page ranking (PR) and some of these sites do not place any “nofollow” coding tags inside the bookmarking links that would then prohibit the search engine robots from following and indexing the social bookmarked web sites. This means that some of the social bookmarking site’s Google page ranking can and will flow down to the socially bookmarked sites from the links. This Google page ranking that flows down to the social bookmarked site can then in turn, at least theoretically help to increase search engine rankings on Google for those sites that have been socially bookmarked.

Website links are important. They are your business’s internet currency. Links determine your relative internet property value by influencing your web site traffic, your search engine rankings and positions for your important keywords, and ultimately links will influence your online sales and profits. Every internet marketing strategy must include a robust process of website link building. Social bookmarking is one of those methods that should be combined with other web linking strategies to achieve online success. Since social bookmark links do not scroll off of a social bookmark site or lose value over time, (if anything they gain value over time) it is in your best interest to have your web site URL and all of it’s important interior page urls to also be socially bookmarked in all the important social bookmark sites on the internet.

Off Page Optimization: Link Building Guidelines for New Website

Off-page optimization refers to factors that have an effect on your website or webpage listing in natural search results. These factors are off-site in that they are not controlled by you or the coding on your page. Off-page factors should be carefully considered and implemented to achieve a higher search engine ranking position. In search engine optimization, “off page” factors have become more and more important as they relate to rankings. These factors are primarily tied to the site’s linking (inbound and outbound) techniques. This is commonly known as link popularity. In particular, solid link popularity can literally make or break a website with the search engines.

Link popularity is the main factor that major search engines use to rank websites. This makes link building an integral part of any effective search engine optimization strategy. Link building is an important part of Search Engine Optimization, and is a practice of getting other websites to link to yours. Link Building with quality backlinks is amongst many important aspects considered by search engines, while determining the rankings of a site. Therefore, creating backlinks is one of the most important tasks you can undertake to promote your website with the search engines. Link Building is a time intensive process. Sometimes, it is so frustrating and confusing. Yet, unavoidable and really worthy. Link building is the “trump card” for higher search engine rankings. There are lots of way to link build your website; but first, I’ll give you some tips on how you do the link building process:

1. Target different anchor text. Target your keywords but make very sure to vary the anchor a lot. Even a few “click here” is good to get.

2. Link in related webpages / websites. This is probably the most important, especially for english web sites. It is commonly believed that links from related pages carries more “weight” (not PR).

3. Acquire links in gradual and natural increase. Don’t place hundreds or thousands of links to a new site the first few days. many have tested and testified about that and gotten their site banned in Google. You must gradually place the links and the quantity all relates to how much links the site is usually getting. So if a site usually gets 10 new links per week then don’t place 100 suddenly one day.

4. Link to good neighborhood website. Don’t have a majority of your backlinks from adult, pharmacy, and poker/casino sites. Such sites are known to spam and I am pretty sure Google frowns upon them.

5. Gain links from both old trusted as well as new sites. It is also good to mix this up.

6. Point to internal pages as well as your home page. Never underestimate backlinks pointing to your internal pages. As you have your internal pages SEO’d as well, get backlinks to these as well with varied anchor.

7. Do not acquire links from paid linking footprints around them. Words such as sponsors, advertisement and the like are spotted by Google and are devalued. If the majority of your backlinks come from such links it could maybe even do you harm.

8. Links must be placed from pages with a varied PR value. In my opinion, not more than 15-20% of your backlinks to a site should be from PR 5+ pages.

The quality of the backlinks depend on genuineness and richness of the content of a particular website which is linking to us, or which we are linking to. The most significant factor in determining the quality of the links is the Relevancy . When we say that a particular link is relevant to our site, we mean that that particular link belongs to a site which is content rich and genuine, and, belongs to the same theme of websites as ours. In simple words, we can say that it is related to our website, so the link coming from their site would be relevant to us. And it is this relevancy of links, which is given weightage to, by the search engines.