An Introduction to Link Building

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by: L Richards
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Embarking on a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign for your company? Link building is a critical strategy to make sure your site and services are as accessible to as many prospective customers as possible.

Relevant links to your site are important primarily because they increase your rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Link building today is not a simple matter of having hundreds of unrelated links pointing back to your site. In order for the search engine algorithms to acknowledge and list you highly for your key-phrase, a worthwhile strategy must take into account the relevancy of the site that is linking to yours, in addition to its age and the frequency by which the site is updated and how often it is visited. These aspects all make up the overall quality of a page.

Aspects such as where exactly your link will appear on a page and exactly what type of link will be used also have to be considered during a link building campaign. Here, the former is important because a link that is surrounded by many others can become ‘diluted’ in comparison to your link appearing alone on a page with an equal ranking. Similarly, depending on whether the anchor text that makes up the link is widely used, the link can increase your search position dramatically; subsequently this must be carefully considered.

Further to the imperative action of making sure many quality sites are linking back to yours, a good link building strategy also needs to incorporate the generation of quality offsite content which can include links back to your site. By writing and syndicating articles and distributing press releases online, you are supplying other web-users with easy to access content that they can use on their own sites and will, in turn, increase the amount of links and the amount of traffic back to your site. Keeping articles informative and press releases newsworthy – as well as making both highly readable – improves the desirability of the content and the inevitable chances of it travelling further, particularly when combined with social media.

Each SEO campaign is different and so good planning and management needs to take into account how suited certain techniques are to your brand. Working within social networking, forums and blogs is also an integral method by which links to your site and brand awareness is achieved during link building. Subsequently, being aware of the audience of your brand and using the relevant online medium can directly improve the relevancy of those linking to you as well as the traffic that comes with it.

Due to the diversity of factors that make up a link building strategy, it is typical for a company to enlist the involvement of a search marketing agency. Akin to the quick developing and ever-changing world of social media, the search engine industry is also constantly evolving. Perhaps the most important aspect of those undertaking a SEO campaign is the constant need to adapt, be forward thinking, and to be aware of the technological advancements just around the corner.