Link Building Basics

Link building is the process of creating inbound links to ones own website. It is probably one of the quickest and best ways to increase your website’s popularity. Inbound links also known as backlinks are incoming links to your site. Search engines look at the number of these links to judge how popular a site is. The amount of inbound links to your site is important but there are many other factors that are also looked at such as the quality and relevance of that incoming link.

Link popularity is one of the largest factors that search engines look at to rank sites accordingly. In the case of link building quality is better than quantity. The bottom line is that you need a lot of links from quality sites to rank well. These quality sites are also known as “authority” sites. An authority site is measured by its combination of size, importance, relevance and is one that is highly ranked in the search engines. Every industry has a handful of these influential authority sites. These sites usually contain all or most of the following characteristics:
- Lots of relevant and dynamic content
- Tons of WebPages, they can easily number in the thousands
- Most of them have high Google page ranks
- Professional appearance to their website
- Many links from similarly themed websitesr
Getting a link from an authority site within your industry will help tremendously boost your rankings.

Link building can be a time consuming and long term process, you do have the option of hiring an SEO company that includes link building as a part of their SEO services. If you
are a do it your-selfer it is possible and at a lower or no cost. Some of the following techniques I will discuss are proven methods and can be very effective if done correctly.

Social media sites are a great resource when it comes to link building. The key here is to write dynamic content that will capture the reader’s attention and will help you gain a lot of targeted traffic to your site. As far as social bookmarking goes you should avoid using automated software, because Google may see it as automated content and will just ignore it. The best way is simply manually with the use of good titles and descriptions.

Writing and submitting a press release is a great way to announce a new product or service or any other company news you would like to send out to the public. There are a great number of press release sites out there, which will assist you in gaining backlinks in a short period of time. Writing and submitting original articles to article directories is another way to gain powerful inbound links.

Another quick link building technique is to submit to directories. There are many free directories on the web to quickly submit a link to. Paying directories to include a link is another method for link building that is debated. Some directories are worth it such as Yahoo while others are not as valued.

Following these techniques will get your link building campaign off and running. Remember link building is not a one time practice and to devote some time each day towards your link building strategy.