Relevant Link Building

link building increases your site's rankings

Build Links To Gain Link Popularity

As we have said many times throughout this website, content is king and always will be. The next most important aspect of your SEO strategy is link building.

The search engines have to look at millions of websites. Many of those sites have equally good unique content. What is the next best way for a search engine to dermine which website should be ranked above the otherse? That's right you guessed it... link popluarity!

Link popularity is heavily weighted by search engines. It gives them a clue as to which website are more popular and therefore have more authority in their particular field. It is important to point out that not all links are created equally. The most desirable links will be coming from other authority websites in your field that have content that is relevant to your own. If you run a baseball card trading website and have 2,000 links coming to your site but they are all on website related to penguine wrestling, then those links won't have much relevance and therefore will carry little wieght in determining your link popularity. If on the other hand you have 40 links back to your baseball trading website coming from collectibles and card trading websites then you will have much higher credibiilty with the search engines than your penguine wrestling counterpart.

How does one obtain links form competitor websites? This is a question that vexes and leads to many hours of frustration for most webmasters. The answer is both siimple and complicated. There are many ways to get incoming or "backlinks" from other relevant websites to your own. Some of the most common include:

• Link Exchanges with other sites
• Forum signature links
• One way links form directory submisssions
• One way links from press releases
• One way links from article submissions
• One way links from 3-way link exchanges with other webmasters
• Paid links
• One way links from social networking sites

Now we can easily go into several pages of explanation proving strengths, weeknesses, and details about how to obtain each specific type of link. For most people it would be incredibly boring or too complicated to read through so we will provide a snapshot of what you need to know about each type of link.

Link Exchanges with other sites

This is the most common type of backlink people get. It involves going through the search engines and visiting relevant websites and contacting them requesting link exchanges. They linkg to you and you link to them. It's very simple and most website owners are willing to particiapte since it benefits both parties. The downside to this is that link exchanges of this type have less wieght with the search engines than some of the other link methods do today. In the past this was the most popular style of backlink gathering but today is lower on the list.

Forum Signature Links

This is a great and simple way to get oneway links back to your website. It simply entails visiting forums related to your website's content and participating while making sure that you have links in your forum signature back to your website. The downside to this is that many forums have "no follow" rules on their forum outbound links. If this is the case search engines won't be able to see the links on their forums to your site. You have to spend the time sifting through related forums finding forum sites that don't enforce this "no follow" rule on the oubound links.

One Way Links From Directory Submission

Another very simple way to get one way links back to your website is by submitting your website details to related directory sites. SEO companies maintain very detailed lists with hundreds if not thousands of free directory sites with categories that cover most every topic that would ever be needed. In the past this was a staple of obtaining one way links back to your site. In recent times however Google has devalued the power of directory links. They are still worth pursuing and should be part of any link building campaign however.

One Way Links From Press Releases & Article Submissions

This has been and still is a primary source of obtaining one way links back to one's website. Not only will you obtain the one way links back to your website form the article submission itself, but if it is well written and dispursed propertly other people will use the article or press release on their website which also required they link back to you, providing infinatey more links as well as direct traffic to your site. This is an often overlooked aspect of link building for novice SEO practitioners. Don't fall into the same mistakes. Make sure that regular article submission and press releases to authority websites is part of your link building campaign!

3-Way Link Exchanges

3-Way links are similar to link exchanges with one difference. You have a baseball card trading website. Another webmaster also has a baseball card trading website, but in addition they have a penguine wrestling website as well. Since we mentioned earlier that link exchanges have been somewhat devalued by Google, why not do a 3-way link exchange? The other webmaster will link to your website on his baseball card trading website, but you will link to his penguine wrestling website on yours. This allows him to get maximum benefit on one of this sites and you to get the maximum link benefit from the relevant link back on his website. These types of link exchanges are very popular in today's SEO world.

Paid Links

There are many website that have great pagerank or lots of traffic. Some of these website allow you to pay a monthly or annual fee to have your link on their authority website. This seems like a great idea since it will be a powerful link providing traffic, high pagreank, or both with little effort on your part. Beware of paid links becuase Google frowns upon websites that pay other sites to link to them. In fact if you are reported or discovered as paying for links of this type it's popssible that Google will ban you permanently form indexing your site in their search engine. We do not recommend participating in paid links for this reason.

Social Networking Sites

There are many sites today that allow you to promote your business to their user base. Some of these sites include: facebook, fastpitch networking, my space, linkden, twitter, and others. Still other social networking sites allow you to submit news to them which can then be rated and distributed to their userbase. Some of these sites include: digg, dropjack, reddit, and others. It is wise for anyone trying to obtain links to utilize these social networking site to promote their blog, article submission, and press releases. While it can be time consuming and tedious to do so, in the long run it will help you to obtain many one way links back to your site as well as to grow a userbase that reads your content regularly.