Link Building

Probably one of the best ways to get links quickly that has a visible effect on your SERPs. What you do is write an article that is about the thing you are trying to promote. Imagine you are promoting an estate agent. Write an article on say, moving house which is around 350 – 400 words. Once you have your article, write a little paragraph that sums up the article and the website you are trying to promote, and place around 2 – 3 links in the paragraph which contain the keywords you are trying to target. Some article directories will alow this in this in the bio - others will only allow links in the bottom paragraph. Here is a list of article directories to submit your articles to:

Artcle Syndication Sites:

http://www.article-submission.net/
http://www.article-submission.us
http://www.articlesup.com/
http://www.articleset.com/
http://www.articlenetworks.com/
http://www.articlenic.com/
http://www.articlemaniac.com/
http://www.articleclick.com/
http://www.articleblotter.com/
http://www.myfamilyliving.com
http://expertsarticles.com/
http://article99.com
http://articles.directorygold.com/
http://article-spot.com

It is always best to get links from webpages with a highpage rank. Here you can see the websites with a pagerank of 10. As you can see they are all very important websites. Nasa, National Science Foundation, etc. For example if you got the BBC (which has a pagerank of 9) to link to your website from their home page – your job as an SEO would probably be over! This is because the BBC website is one of the best websites on the internet. It has hundreds of thousands of links, thousands of pages with unique well written content. It is nearly impossible to get links from pages with a pagerank over 6, because of the value of these links. A good rule of thumb is never bother with webpages with a pagerank of 0. The best you are likely to get is 1-3. In my experience the best I have every got is a 6, but this took a lot of wrangling, trading, exchanging my own links. Pagerank only works as a guide to getting links. Sometimes a website is waiting to have a pagerank score added to it. If you think the website looks good, is related to yours and could be valuable resource – get the link anyway!

The most valuable links are organic links. These are links you have specifically asked for on a website that is related to yours. Although these are the most valuable links they are not the quickest way of getting of links. They are very labour intensive and you will probably only be able to get around 50 month. But it is still very important to know. This is the way that google suggests you should get links. For example say I am a hobbyist. I am interested in model cars. I make them and I have started my own club. I have just made a website and I want to get people involved with my model car club. Now, I would start looking for websites which say model car parts, or associations to do with model cars. I would then send them a link exchange request.

Dear Whoever,

I just stumbled across your site and I must say that it looks like a fantastic resource about *******, (model cars) I especially liked your ******* (for example, piece or articles on model cars) If you could paste this link on your website I would be very greatful, and offer you a link from one of page rank * sites, or one of our other sites.

http://www.website.co.uk

http://www.website.co.uk

http://www.website.co.uk

http://www.website.co.uk

If you decide right away – here is the code which you can copy and paste into your website

<a href="http://www.whatever.com”>model car club brighton</a>

Thanks

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Here you offer a link in return for the one that they will offer you. This would be called a reciprocal link exhange (one for another).

Good Neighbourhood Links

These are links from websites that are related to your website. Google would analysise your links using a thesaurus system where relations between words would be given a score. Cat, dog, hamster, are all animals and are therefore related to each other, so would be given a high relational score, more specifically they are all pets, so would be given a higher relational score for the word pet.

If I had a website which sold cat litter trays, a good website to get a link from would be a website related to pet supplies, so I would try to get a link from a website which say, sold dog collars. This would be called a good neighbourhood link. A link from a website that is related to yours. The Link can be as tenuious as you like, just bare in mind your website would have to share a lot of similar words as the one you are getting the link from.

Bad Neighbourhood Links.

Getting a link from a website that is completely unrelated to yours. If I sold racing car parts, I would not want to get a link from a website that sold plant seeds. This can have a detrimental effect on your search result, even to the point of moving it right down.

So what is Link Building?

Link Building, simply enough is the process of getting links from other websites to point at your site. This is the way that Google and other Search Engines, such as Yahoo, MSN, ASK, etc assess the popularity of a particular website. Much in the same way that an election works, so does linking; the person with the most votes wins. The website with the most links pointing at it gets the highest in the search engine rankings, or SERPs. (Search Engine Results Pages).

Larry Page and Serge Brin; the founders of Google, divised a special way of counting all these links, called PageRank. PageRank is the basis of Google and how it works. The maths and science behind pagerank, is quite complicated, but in a nutshell, it is an algorithm that calculates all the links on the internet. It then gives a score to a webpage, based on the amount of links that website page is receiving.

It works by both assessing the links to that webpage and from that webpage. A link to a webpage is called a backlink. But be aware all links are not the same.

This is a very important point to remember when link building. For example: If I have 10 links pointing at a webpage and 1 link from that webpage, that one link is going to be very powerful. If I have 1 link to a webpage and 10 links from that webpage, those 10 links will not be very powerful.