Link Building for Online Success

Link building is at the core of any successful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign and is responsible for the bulk of the top 10 listings in achieved in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. To understand how links can affect the rankings of a site in search engines you must first understand how search engine algorithms work.

When a search engine spiders or crawls a site it takes note of many factors including content, site layout and structure, references to a page or site, and also the links coming in to a site. There are many other factors that are included but these are the main four. The search engine then scores the site in these different categories and determines how it compares to the other sites competing for the same terms or niche. The main factor we will be discussing here is the links coming into a site.

Links that come into a site pass what is called link juice or power and also reputation. These links basically count as votes for your site. The more powerful a vote is and what the vote is for is what really counts. Let us say that you get 100 links from new sites with very few links coming into their sites and your competitor gets just 5 from well established sites with many external links pointing to them. Who do you think would rank higher for whatever anchor text the links had in them. The internet is not a democracy and some sites just have more power.

The power of a link is determined by the link popularity of the site that it is coming from. This is usually done by counting the number of links coming into that domain. There is one other facet though. Not all links are equal so a link from a domain with 100 links to it can indeed be more powerful than a link from a site with 50,000 external links pointing to it. To determine the power of a link you will want to look at both how many links are coming into the domain linking to your site and also the quality of the links coming into the domain.

The reputation that is passed by a link is determined by the anchor text used within the link and also the topic of the page it is placed on. If a link points to your site with the anchor text “Link Building”, then that site is saying that your site is about building links. This is further reinforced when the page that link is on is also related to link building in some way such as internet marketing or search engine optimization. Search engines such as Google are working hard to figure out the relationship between words and soon if not currently will realize that link building is related to internet marketing, SEO, and other related key phrases.
Now that we understand how Google views links and how those links are used to calculate rankings we can move on to discuss how to obtain these ever so valuable and elusive links.

There are many ways to get links to your site such as buying links, trading links, commenting, and earning links for editorial value.

Of course the latter is the best because these links are given to your site because it has value and is of use to the other sites readers. These links are great and further reinforce the idea of developing good, quality, useful content. Unfortunatly these links are hard to come by and if your competitors are using other methods of obtaining links (and they are!) then you will be soon lift in the dust.

If it were a perfect world and everyone played fair then the above mentioned method would be ideal. This is simply not the case so you as a business and website owner must be more proactive in your efforts to obtain links (votes) for your site. This is not an easy endeavor and should not be underestimated.
In order to buy links you will first have to find a reliable source. Then you will have reoccurring costs associated with those links as most companies that sell links charge on a month to month basis. This can add up fast and you will soon find that the cost of these links are far outpacing the income generated from you site. Also once you discontinue your subscription to these paid links the search engines will notice that your link popularity has fallen drastically and your rankings will soon reflect this change in a negative way.

Your other options include trading links and blog commenting. Trading links is tedious and without a proven method can defiantly fall short in producing results. Also you must have something to trade your prospective link partners. This is a big negative as you don’t want to give away links on your sites. You want to horde that link power for yourself!

Blog commenting is hit or miss and requires a massive amount of admin and oversight to be done correctly. First of all you must find blogs and other sites that allow comments. Then you have to get past their spam detection methods. This could mean that you end up doing a lot of work for very little return.
Here at Mark My Words Media we have developed a link building system over several years of trial and error that is producing proven results for both us and our clients, whether they are in small niche markets or in hype competitive fields such as sports tickets.

Don’t let the future of your website or online venture become jeopardized. Choose a professional with proven results in link building and other SEO methods lead you on the path to success. Your financial future may depend upon it.