What is link building
If you’ve investigated the world of online marketing, chances are good you’ve heard the term “link building”. But if you are new to the online marketing world, chances are equally likely that the term is somewhat confusing to you. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
Essentially, link building refers to endorsement by a third party. Let’s illustrate by way of an example:
If you were to ask the president of Amazon.com which was the best online book-selling site, chances are you could predict the answer. Not exactly the definition of impartiality, right? But what if you were to poll random people (co-workers, for example) about what their favorite online book-buying site was. If the majority of the people answered “Amazon.com” you’d probably take that as a more valuable indicator, right? These opinions, assuming they come from people unaffiliated with Amazon.com, are a form of third-party endorsement.
Similarly, building links for your website (and, therefore, for your business) is about getting third-party businesses to endorse you. But how do you do that?
Reciprocal linking
This is by far the most cost-effective way to build links. As opposed to having a link building site do the work for you, reciprocal linking can be done by yourself. Basically, you add to your site a link to a third-party site and that site, in turn, links to yours. The best part is that this is usually all done for free.
The point of reciprocal linking is that it helps to build traffic to your site, especially if you can manage to form a link relationship with sites that already have high search-engine rankings. When a web user clicks through to a high-ranking site that contains your link, the chances are greatly increased that they will also visit your site when compared to the chances that a user will “mine through” several pages of search engines results and click on your lower-ranked site.
One-way links
Although reciprocal links are the friendliest on your operating budget, they aren’t necessarily the most effective method of building links to drive traffic to your site. Search engines like Google place a higher value on one-way links. The reasoning is this: If a third-party site is willing to link to your site despite receiving nothing in return, your site must be a darn good one, one with value that needs to be seen by as many people as possible. So, any sites that are linked to via one-way links receive better page rankings. And, since higher rankings translates into more traffic, one-way linking is a very effective way to get more people to your site.
Does this all sound too good to be true? To some extent, it is. Yes, one-way linking does exist and can be very beneficial to your site, but it can be very difficult to find a site that is willing to link to your site without getting something in return. Generally, that “something in return” comes in the form of payment.
However, it is extremely tough to find a site that will agree to do one way link building. Usually, you have to offer something in exchange for it such as a payment.
Link Building is one of the most important factors in SEO; however, it also proves to be one of the most difficult tasks as well. I’m not trying to put down On Page work because On Page plays a huge role in successful SEO. On Page work is what makes a site relevant and link building is what makes it important. The two work hand in hand with each other, and must be used for any site to be successful in SEO.
Thanks for stopping by!
Scotty S. ©2009
