Link Building: A Brief Introduction

The aim of link building is to ultimately increase traffic to your website. Link building achieves this by placing links to your website on other web pages. Simple? No. The following may be common sense for many of you; however so many people go about this the wrong way far too often.

Google search spiders are now pretty advanced. They have a whole write-up on how they work (at least what they want you to know), and as a budding Search Optimiser I’d recommend you give them a read.

Links that come from relevant sites hold more worth to you for two reasons. Firstly, they’re on topic – the surrounding content is going to be consistent with the information on your page, and the Google bots will know this, thus putting that little bit of extra weight behind that link. Secondly, if the site that you’re looking at receives high amounts of traffic, chances are you’ll get some click through to your site.

Trust and authority mean just as much as Page Rank in the current SEO climate. Many notable bloggers have commented on how Page Rank is a delayed metric that is not often updated. By attracting links to your website from pages that have high trust and authority ratings, your site will in turn gain in trust and authority. Generally good sources of these links are from academic institutions and government bodies. URLs ending with .edu, .ac.uk and .gov will generally have high authority ratings, so if you see a relevant article that may benefit from a link to some quality content on your site, you will have nothing to lose by approaching the academic staff or administrators running that site or page.

The amount of links to your site also affects your SERP listings. Having around 200 domains providing you 1800 backlinks would be ideal, but not necessarily possible in the short run. Many Search Engine Optimisers may suggest mass article submissions, providing potentially thousands of links. This is generally a bad way of marketing a website, as many of these directories and article bases may be known to Google and links from them discounted in search result pages. Also, submitting to such directories may harm your linking by associating yourself with ‘bad networks’ of websites purposely created to drive mass produced content.