What is link building?
Link-building is the practice of obtaining links from external web sites to your own to improve both direct referrals (people clicking on the links) and search engine ranking. In theory, if two pages are equally relevant to a search term, the page with the better inbound link profile will rank higher than the other page in search results.
Like in everything else in life, the world does not reward those who sit back and wait for links to come to them. It is incumbent on website owners to go out and tell the world about their site and get people to link to it. Companies who do not pursue link building are likely to lose their search engine traffic, or never even receive traffic to sustain their business to begin with.
Why does link building improve my placement in the search rankings?
For almost all popular search terms or keywords there are hundreds or potentially thousands of relevant and competing websites. Search engines need a method to help them determine which websites are an authority in their area. By examining your “link profile” or how many and what type of sites link to your site they are able to do this. The idea of using links to measuring a site’s importance was first made popular by Google, with the implementation of their PageRank algorithm. In simple terms, each link to a web page is a vote for that page.
Not all links are equal.
When Google introduced the idea of PageRank they borrowed the idea from academia, where a publish authors work could be measured by the number of other experts site their work. This worked great for academia but because of the commercial nature of the Internet this system left the opportunity for manipulation. As a result the algorythim has become greatly more complex, and many other factors are now considered when the search engines analyze your link profile.
Two major factors in link analysis by the search engines are Relevance and Authority.
Relevance. If the link comes from a site that is on the same topic as the publisher’s site (or a closely related topic), that link is worth more than a links that comes from a site with an unrelated topic
Authority. It is generally accepted that search engines attempt to measure how much they trust a site. If a site is highly trusted, its vote will count for more than if it is not that trusted.
Generally speaking link building is the life blood of any successful search marketing campaign.
Search Marketing is a very confusing field. The range of offerings really runs the gambit. From offers to get 400,000 links in a day for 29.99 (total garbage) to real professional search marketing or consulting that can range well into the thousands or even tens of thousands per month. Becoming an SEO professional has a fairly low barrier of entry and anyone can say they are an SEO. So when in the market for professional SEO help what should you look for? Below are some tips on things to look for when in the market to help keep you from getting ripped off.
Things your prospective SEO should share with you:
A clear understanding of exactly what method the SEO will use to help you rank higher – SEOs should be able to clearly communicate their business process. How do they do keyword research and selection, on site optimization and link building. What method do they use to track results and how often will that info be communicated with you? Are they able to clearly articulate it so you understand what they are tying to accomplish? If not there is a good chance they don’t know what they can or want to accomplish for you.
Good competitive information on your current site and competition – A good SEO should be able to easily layout how you compare to you competition today and why. Your competitors are likely watching your search marketing efforts, your SEO needs to be able to do the same. There are many tools available for this, both free and paid. One of many methods I have had success with to communicate clients strengths and weaknesses over competition is the visual below. A graph similar to this and the corresponding data is a great visual representation of several factors involved in SEO and helps clients understand there current competitive landscape. Of course there is much more data you could review with an SEO but this is a good jumping off point and is a good visual representation. This can even be broken down further an examples of competitions links, etc can be provided.
Long term SEO project plan – SEO is a long and ongoing undertaking. If an SEO professional promises significant results in 30, 60 or even 90 days, run, don’t walk. You should be able to review with them a detailed sample project play that outlines activities week by week, and month by month. Project elements should include goal setting, keyword research, on site optimization, landing pages, analytics and tracking, directory submission, competitive link analysis, link building and much more.
While I don’t pretend this is all you should ever see from an SEO, this is a good place to start. It is really important you understand and are comfortable with an SEO and how they work. Bad SEO practices can not only waste your time and money, but can actually cause you to be penalized or even banned from the search engines. How’s that for double kick in the pants? You could waste your money and get your site banned!
SEO or SEM?
With all of the SEO companies popping up everywhere how do you know your SEO efforts are going to pay off? I spend a significant amount of time reviewing SEO offerings from other companies and find that the range in quality of SEO can vary greatly. While doing proper SEO is very important, will SEO alone dramatically improve your ranking in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)? If you don’t have an effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, the answer is probably not! SEM uses several techniques that could include but aren’t limited to, SEO, Link Building, Pay Per Click, Social Media and more. The focus of this article, and one of the more difficult and time consuming aspects of a good SEM campaign, is link building.
What is link building and why is it important?
Link building is the process of building your sites link popularity, or simply put, creating links back to your site from other sites. This is very important and arguably the most heavily weighed factor in determining your site ranking in the SERPs. Through building a large amount of outside links back to your site, the Search Engines will view you as more relevant, credible (possibly), and popular. Ideally you should try and build links from credible websites with content related to you site. The more popular and credible the linking website the more it should help you. There are all sort of potential ramifications for building links from unsavory websites and link exchange services which are beyond the scope of this article. But suffice it to say you can actually be doing more damage than good if you try and take shortcuts. Remember if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is… and it’s been my experience that this adage holds truer today, on the internet, than at any point in history! (Thanks Nigeria!)
Why link building today is harder than ever.
After many years of link building abuse from comment spammers and the like, Google came up with an answer, the nofollow tag. Because of rampant misuse of people posting spam comments on blogs, bulletin boards, and content sites, the nofollow tag was introduced. This is a method by which sites could still allow users to post links, without lending any of their sites credibility to the referring link. In other words, your site now gets NO credit for linking if the referring site uses the nofollow tag. It seems major sites, that were once a staple of link building (both credible and otherwise) are all going the way of the nofollow tag. Wikipedia, craigslist, yahoo answers, and the list goes on. While I am not sad to see spammers lives made more difficult, this has made credible link building more difficult for the rest of us. Below are 5 ideas for good and credible link building after the nofollow tag.
- Article Syndication – Writing relevant articles with good content, that will interest readers is always a great idea for more than just link building. It helps establish your reputation as a professional and build credibility. It is also very time consuming but over the long run well worth it. As part of your link building campaign consider writing 2 to 3 articles a week and syndicating those to 10 – 20 different article syndication sites. Part 2 of this article will include syndication sites listed by popularity and that will be a great place to start! It may take you an extra 5 or 10 hours a week, but your efforts will pay off big time over time. If you don’t have the time, consider hiring someone who will work with you to develop link building plan and submit your articles for you. There are many good companies out there that can help you with this.
- Press Releases – Have you recently launched your business or a new website, product or anything else worth telling the world about? Consider issuing a press release. While most of these services are not free they are a very effective means to get the word out about your company and create links from highly trusted websites. PR Newswire offers a large variety of services that can reach many different audiences. It’s not free but it is effective.
- Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking sites are a great way to promote your content. Part 2 of this article will include a current list of social bookmarking sites that do not make use of the nofollow tag and more detailed strategy using social bookmarking.
- Blogging – Blogging is a great way to add content to your site, gain a following of readership, gain relevancy and credibility with the search engines and your prospects and clients. Blogging can also be a great way to link build. Once you have established your blog and have a decent following, you can make use of guest bloggers from other popular blogs, or even link to another popular blog when you see a post that you think is excellent and your readers would appreciate. There is a reasonable chance the owner will notice your inbound link and link back, if you have good and relevant content. Warning: if you do plan to blog, make sure you stay on top of it and post content frequently. Weekly if not daily is preferred, but even more important than frequency of posting, post GOOD CONTENT.
- Trade Links (if it’s relevant and beneficial) – Email the webmasters of sites that compliment your site but generally do not compete with it, the more popular the better. Outline the benefits for them to link to your site. Explain how their readers could benefit from the content on your site and how your readers benefit from the content on theirs! ALWAYS HAVE A LINK TO their site on your site already BEFORE you do this. Include the location of this link on your site in the email and explain why your visitors benefit from linking to them. This can be a very effective tool when done right because you are building links from highly popular and highly relevant sites to yours.
