BUSINESS - 7

LINK BUILDING

I.Link Building For Beginners

Link building is an important aspect of successful marketing of a website or online business. In its most basic definition, link building is simply the process of sharing links and getting your links onto others' sites so that you can draw more traffic to your website. It also refers to building your own website's links so that you can offer adequate information and resources to your visitors. However, link building can actually get a whole lot more complicated than this basic definition. Here are some tips and informative bits that will help you to better understand link building, both as a process and in terms of what it can do for your website. To follow are a few tips on link building for beginners.

First, the importance of links should be known and is good basic information as to link building for beginners. Ultimately, someone putting a link to your site on theirs is like them voting for you. It shows the search engines that they find your link useful, which will get it a higher ranking. The more links, or "votes", you have, the higher your ranking will be. However, having thousands of links out there on all sorts of random sites is not a productive act in link building. Instead, it is better to only include links on sites that have a few basic elements that are necessary for the best link building:

- Credibility: if a site is junk their vote will mean less than a link on a popular or credible site.
- Relevance: if you're linking to a website about auto insurance, don't put links on a kid's gaming site. Not only is it pointless, it also looks like unethical link building to the search engines.
- Anchor text: the words that are used in correlation with your link can make or break its value.
- Position: where your link is placed on a page says a lot. Your link is best placed near the top of the page, within content instead of a list of links, and with as few competing links as possible.

Some of the best link building takes place in articles, directory submissions, and forum postings. What does this mean for you? If you can get your links into relevant sites and have them placed among articles or at the top of a directory list, you'll get better results from your link building. The use of forums, or message boards, is also useful. However, you need to be careful not to just drop your link off and say nothing; most forum posters will delete links that aren't useful and just for traffic generation.

This is only the introduction to link building. There is much more to be learned about this great marketing tool.

II. Understanding Link Building And Why You Need Links

If you are going to succeed with an online business or website, you need to have the right internet marketing strategy set up. This can include marketing tools such as SEO, PPC advertising, and even banner advertising. Perhaps one of the most respected and most successful methods of internet advertising, however, is link building.

Link building is ultimately like having other websites give you a good vote, because they put your link on their site. Let's break it down, to make it easier for you to understand.

When you embark on the process of link building, your goal is to get your website's URL on other websites. These links will basically show the search engine that someone else thinks you have credible information, because they are backing up your site with your link on their page. Ultimately, this is like getting votes for your site, because the more credible links you have, the higher your search engine ranking will be. Note the use of the word "credible." You might have 80 sites out there with your link on them. Good for you; if only twenty or thirty of them are credible, strongly rated websites, those are the only ones that matter. What's more, the ones on weaker sites can actually DECREASE your ranking.

Although it seems like a good idea to quantify your link building by getting as many links on as many sites as you can, this isn't the key to successful link building. Proper linking focuses on quality rather than quantity, meaning that having links on 10 or 20 good sites is better than having your URL on 50 so-so websites. The quality of the "votes" you're getting is far more important to the search engines than the number. Another element that plays a large role will be the position of your links on the page. For example, links near the top of the page rank better than links that are in the bottom part of the page or jumbled into a resource box in the footer.

Now that you understand why you need link building and what practices are best, you're probably wondering how you get your links posted in the first place. That's the part that can get tricky. Directory submissions and forum postings are easy, you just place your link and you're done. Getting your link on sites in other ways takes time, though. You have to establish relationships and network with other websites to achieve this. If you prefer, you can hire a marketing team to do it for you.