Link Building 101

I found this on another site and thought it might be useful to give people a better insight into how link building works and things to avoid if your going to link build.

Backlink Checker
Backlink Checker - iWEBTOOL.com
Backlink checker checking back links link popularity checker

Backlink Checker (keyword)
Internet Marketing Tools: Free SEO Tools

Types of Link Strategies

Natural Link Building - Adding quality content or something that benefits the end user that they would want to link to
Affiliate Linking - Some companies such as airlines, debt management companies, or other businesses that have vendors that supply a service or product to them, can be contacted and asked to provide a link to the site you are promoting. These are usually especially strong, and easily obtained one-way backlinks because normally they don’t have a bunch of other links diminishing the value of your backlink.
One-Way Linking (Purchase) - Buying one-way inbound links to your web site
Reciprocal Linking - Exchanging links with another web site
Three-Way Linking - Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to site A (www.three-way-links.com/)
Link Farms (NOT RECOMMENDED) - Companies like linkmarket.net (but not directories, FFA’s, or obvious abusers of linking)
Forums and Blogs -Links from forums an blogs this could be from signatures or blog posts or comments
News Articles (PR Web) – Typically created by web site owners to promote their site. These are effective after 2-4 weeks when Google has crawled them and indexed them within their search results. Never put more than 1 link to any one page per article.

There are many ways to gain back links from a web site. You can offer valuable information on something that an end-user finds useful, such as a map to, or of a destination, a tool such as a mortgage calculator, or even a coupon or shopping tips.
This is the way the search engines want you back links to occur…as this is the Natural Link Building process; An end-user finds something on a web site that they feel is useful and they create a link to it.
Another method is purchasing One-Way Links. You must be very careful when attempting this strategy as many things can go awry, and the search engines (especially Google), are looking very hard at how to avoid awarding web sites higher SERP’s based on link building efforts attempting to obtain a more favourable position in their search engine.

Whilst Google Page Rank doesn’t directly affect your SERP’s, the back links from trusted sources do. The way this works is that Google looks at the PR of the referring web site and passes on PR. The influence of this “bleeding” affect is determined by:
• The PR of the referring site
• The number of outbound links on the page containing your back link
• The “trust” rating of the referring web site, according to Google, which is based on the registration date and consistent content, as well as the web sites own back links and these same parameters

This, put in basic terms, means that spending the time that it takes to obtain a back link from a site that has no PR is meaningless.
Here is an example of Google’s “weightedness” (a made up word)
Site 1 with a PR5 has 50 links (the max you want on 1 page) = bleeds .0012 PR
Site 2 with a PR5 has 10 links = bleeds .430 PR
Site 3 with a PR5 has 2 links = bleeds .776 PR
Additionally, Google seemingly awards back links from .org’s slightly higher, and back links from .edu’s and ‘gov’s significantly higher. This opens many vertical possibilities when taken into consideration whilst planning your long-term back link strategy.

The following is the same example above, but is based off a back link from a .edu and a .gov
.gov/.edu Site 1 with a PR5 has 50 links (the max you want on 1 page) = bleeds .4352 PR
.gov/.edu Site 2 with a PR5 has 10 links = bleeds .88721 PR
.gov/.edu Site 3 with a PR5 has 2 links = bleeds 1.176 PR
So this means that it is important to get back links from high PR sites, as well as sites that have related content.

The Link
Just as important as the back links, the actual content of the back link is as important.
Because of the overwhelming problem the SE’s are experiencing with Spammers and Black-Hatters overtaking their results and therefore skewing the quality of the overall purpose of their primary intended function, which is search and providing relevant results, each of the main three search engines have introduced, or are soon to introduce an entirely new algorithm that, in purpose, is meant to eliminate the bad, and provide genuine, relevant results, which is what the end-user is looking for.
So Google tweaked their algorithm to place an increased weight on not only back links, but the actual content of the back link.
What this means is that if I were optimising a web site and one of its keyword phrases were “debt consolidation”, I would create a back link that used “debt consolidation” (actually I would use “Get Debt Consolidation” because you need a ‘buffer’ word before your keywords in ANY circumstance when doing optimization to avoid obvious SEO red flags), and the link description would also include that phrase. So, a good example of this is here:

Expert Debt Consolidation – Get Cheap Debt Consolidation Now.

This is a basic example. Every web site and back link offer/tool will have different parameters stating how many characters you can use, the length, content, number of caps, number of expletives like “best”, “cheapest”, or “lowest” type. The point I am making here is that you need to take full advantage of the link. You do this with carefully selected anchor text and descriptions. These links need to be carefully created and linked back to SE optimized landing pages that mirror your anchor text and description. These elements are EXACTLY what ALL search engines, especially Google, use to weight or grade the link.
This, coupled with quality content and the correct keyword density and other SEO elements, are core in the future of obtaining high rankings with all SE’s organically, and PPC at a cost well under what the competition is paying.

Link Tools
Alexa, WebCEO, Arelis and many other tools are available that work in an efficient way, and can be very effective if utilized in the correct fashion. These tools will take your selected keyword and based on the parameters that you set up, crawl the search engines and the top ranking web sites that come up for that particular query. They then pull any available emails from the site, if available, or if there isn’t one available, it will default to whatever you select (i.e. webmaster@ or info@).
So lets say you are searching for back links from sites that are related to women’s under garments for Bravissimo. I would enter “women’s clothing” into the search box and these tools come back with the number of sites that you request. The tools give you the amount of back links a site already has, the PR strength, a relevancy grade and so on.
These tools have other optional settings to help in your link building schemes.
• Find web sites with link suggestion forms that can be setup to be completed automatically and submitted;(Not recommended)
• Find web sites that link to your competitors
• Find web sites that already link to you (to possibly change the anchor text or add additional deep links)
• Find web sites by doing a keyword search
Investigate the many tools available to find the one that suits your needs the best. Stay away from the cookie cutter approach if possible as link building has been going on for years and most web site owners have received thousands of “canned” requests over the years.




Things to Avoid
• Stay away from link farms
• The site has no possible connection to your subject matter whatsoever. The page they put your link on isn't linked to FROM any page, meaning it's floating out there in never-never land and is a ploy to get you to link to their site.
• The page where they put your link is on a URL a mile long and several directories deep so engines will never find it.
• The page looks like a farmer's field with nicely arranged rows of links to hundreds of sites which aren't necessarily organized in any logical manner, but that doesn't matter because someone told them the link is all that counts.
• It's a link and a link only. No description. No proof the person ever actually reviewed the site.
• Signs they'll accept anything that shows evidence of being a "live" link. A true Directory has criteria, frets about the quality of sites it links to and doesn't have people out begging for links. Instead the reverse is true, with people begging to be let in.
• Watch for scams such as sub-domain one-way traffic feeders where the page your site is linked to isn't part of the main website. Study the URLS carefully before you decide to accept a link request.
• Stay away from FFA sites (Free For All)
• Avoid being on a web site that has pages and pages of links. This is viewed as a Link Farm.
• Stay away from sex oriented, gambling, RX and other unsavoury sites.
• Be aware of the possibility of bad neighbours. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy server with a spammer or banned site.
• Don’t waste your time getting a link from a non-ranking page within a site. The page needs to hold a rank of a minimum PR value of 1 below your landing page, particularly if there are going to be other outbound links to other web sites. If there are not going to be other outbound links, or just a few, then a PR of 2 and above will still boost your ranking and benefit your SERP’s as well as your own PR.
• Stay away from link pages called “Link Partners”, “Links” or the like, especially if the term “link” or “links” is part of the URL
• Stay away from pages that have more than 50 outbound links
If you are looking to build long-term rankings, it takes more work and creativity than just sending out automated emails or joining a linking program. Create a daily “hit list” outlining exactly what you will do.

Lastly, keep at it! Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve been given what is probably the most important job that influences search engine results. The work you do today, will put a web site a the top of the rankings tomorrow, and keep them there.


Thanks to GarytheScubaGuy for this article

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Online Marketing Cheltenham | SEO Cotswolds

Anyone tried using this information to help them get better results? Or even know of some more ways to improve link building?

I’d love to hear if people have had any success or even people who have made their own link building 101 list and would like to share it.

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Online Marketing Cheltenham | SEO Cotswolds

It'll take my brain a while to take this all in. When I tested the two links to look at my own back links the first one showed 1,539 and the second 1,384.

I'm happy with 500 hits every day; I hit 700 last Sunday so I'm getting closer to my target of 1K.

Thanks for the post.

Mike

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My own Bonsai Blog site


Click HERE to make a clicking sound.

Probably I will do link wheeling at first and then will go with off page for the back links.

Link wheels can be very affective as long as they are done correctly and not done with spam

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Online Marketing Cheltenham | SEO Cotswolds

Hey this is awesome!

I'm trying the tools right now and this is really a lot of help!

I'm currently trying the blogs right now and keyword links this will get some time in getting used to but I know that this will be rewarding as well.

Many Thanks!

Really helpful tools, thanks

Hello,

Link wheeling is not very helpful, search engines are not very cordial towardslink wheels. Article posting and blogs are good way to generate quality backlinks.


Regards,
creeper

kloudsocial|socialcreeper|yousocial

I would dis agree if you create a good link wheel properly and spend time on it then it can be very effective if you rush it then of course it will not pay off.

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Online Marketing Cheltenham | SEO Cotswolds

This would be a very effective way if every thing is done without any spamming.