Link building guide for beginners
Written/updated by Thomas Skov Iversen
Link building is one of the most important factors when it comes to getting a high search engine rank. But why is getting a high rank on search engines so important? A high rank equals a top(or high) position in search results. The further you are to the top, the more traffic(visitors) you will be generating. And if your are trying to profit from your site, then large amounts of traffic is what you want!
As a starting point, I will explain why links and link building is so important to your position in search engines. However, as this is a beginners guide, it will not cover all subjects and aspects within the field of link building. With that being said, you will at the end of this article be more than well equipped to start building links your self.
So why are links so important?
Imagine that a link is a vote. Every link from an external website to your website will tell the search engines that your content is valuable to other people. That link will consequently count as a vote for your site - The more votes it gets the more valuable your site becomes in the eyes of other people, and search engines will as a result also rank your site higher!
You might think that getting a whole lot of random links pointing to your site would be enough to get you a high rank. This is however an incorrect approach to link building.
Opposite a regular democratic election some online votes counts more than others. As a matter of fact one vote from one important site can count as much as ten votes from ten less important sites. Take for instance governments and educational sites. These sites are very important to search engines and links coming from these will consequently boost your rank a lot
Links will get their importance based on the following factors:
The strength of the website:
The strength of the linking website is a major factor when it comes to the valuation of a link. The strength of a website can be measured and determined based on something called a Page Rank.
Page Rank is the result of a big ballot taking place on the "world wide web". This continuous ballot will determine what strength the millions and millions of different online sites will get. Google will as an example assign a number between 1 and 10 to each website on the web. 10 will be given to the most important sites and 1 for the least important. Google then uses this value to determine if a link from a given website should have a strong or a weak vote.
Lets say that a Page Rank 7 site links to your website, then this link will count more than if a Page Rank 4 site where linking to your site. This is obviously because a Page Rank 7 site is more important in the eyes of google than a Page Rank 4 site. You can check the Page Rank of different sites using this link: Here
The Page relevance:
If anything should be more important than the strength of the website, it would have to be the relevance of the linking site in relation to your site. For instance, if you own a website about running shoes, then a link from a Page Rank 3 site about running shoes will count more than a link from a Page Rank 5 site about flowers. This is however a bit of a grey area, as it highly depends on the ability of the search engines to understand and read website content.
The anchor text:
The text used to link to your site, that is the actual text in the link, is also very important. It is therefore always a good idea to incorporate some keywords in the anchor text. For BeginnerTuts.com a great anchor text would be: Free beginner video tutorials
Link position:
If a link is placed in the top of a website it counts more than if was placed in the bottom. In addition, a link will gain extra strength if the number of other links on the page is limited. This makes perfect sense, as search engines will be reading the link as being something unique and actually put on the site for the purpose of being clicked. If it is furthermore placed at the top of the page the search engines will be reading the link first and thereby assigning it more value.
Other factors evidently exist, but since this is a beginners guide to link building I will keep it simple and not get into those here. With that in mind, try to build links matching the factors mentioned above. In the end, you will always benefit from choosing relevant and strong sites, instead of spreading your links randomly all over the internet.
The different elements of link building has now been described, including why link building is so important to the success of your website. The next section will describe some different link building tactics. Link building tactics is about how and where you choose to build your links. It should be emphasized that your imagination is the only limit when it comes to link building tactics. Consequently the list below is not complete - This is after all a beginners guide to link building!
Link building tactics
Articles
Writing an article is a good way of building links. Within your article you will be able to link to your own site, and when the article gets published on some strong(high ranking) external website, your links will be voting for your site. You should however always remember to create articles containing relevant and useful content, so that they do not appear to be created just for the sake of link building.
Thus always pick a subject that you find interesting and relevant to your own website. An article will not only provide you with excellent links, but also generate traffic for your site - So what are you waiting for? Start sharing your knowledge! To share your knowledge on a certain subject can actually be more satisfying than your think, especially if you get positive feedback on your work.
After creating the article you need to get it published on the web. For this purpose you should use an article submission service. These you can find using google - There are plenty of them, so pick one that is relevant for your own website!
Link directories
Adding links to link directories can be a long and exhausting task. Directory submissions have to be done manually and follow the rules of the directory. In addition you always have to create a unique title and description for all your submissions, as the link directories do not accept titles and texts that have been used before.
Many directories offer a free link on their website, but if you want to get your link on the directory faster than 2-3 months you will need to pay a small fee. You should always consider if the fee is worth it, especially if the directory has a low Page Rank.
There are plenty of link directories on the web - some however are better than others, and some basically just want to fool you into paying money. Therefore you should always choose your directories wisely(consider Page Rank, site relevancy and site credibility). Luckily Google has lately initiated a serious clean up of poor link directories making it easier to find decent directories.
Forums
Many people probably do not like this link building tactic, but if it is used correctly it can actually provide you with some good results. This type of link building tactic has gotten a bit of a bad reputation, as blog's and forums has been spammed by unethical webmasters in the past. Some even took it to the extreme and created bots to crawl forums and spam them with links. The problem still exists, but fortunately its not as bad as it has been.
If you have your ethics right, there is nothing wrong with this tactic, and it will actually make it possible for you to get some 100% legitimate links. Your forum posts should (if you do this the right way ) then always be serious and relating to the actual forum thread - maybe you could even help somebody! Take for instance a forum thread about nice flower. If your site is about nice flowers and have a lot of pictures of nice flowers on it, it would only be appropriate to share a link to your site on that thread. Administrators would not ban you for this, as your link clearly relates to the actual forum thread.
Conclusion
Link building is important - no doubt about it! To do it right is crucial, as the opposite can have a negative effect! What has been described in this article is the most basic within link building. It is therefore recommended that you also read other articles and blog's if you want to dig a little deeper. This guide will however be able to help you avoid some of the general pitfalls within link building, such as building links on sites that haven't held value since 2005.
The next article will show you how to get started profiting from your website, by using Google Adsense Get started with Adsense
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