Link Building Strategies - Part 1 - Introduction
Why is link building important?
In an offline business, publicity for the business grows with the help of several sources like media that includes television, newspaper and magazines and of course the most ancient yet powerful medium, word of mouth. This helps to get many people to know about your business and buy your products or services if they are impressed.
Likewise, the web presence of an online business increases with the promotion of your business by attracting human traffic to your website. Once the traffic comes in, the prospective customers buy your products or services if what you offer satisfies them. How do you attract traffic to your website? This is the concept behind link building that is the most important off-page SEO factor that decides upon the success of any business.
I am not going into detail about the on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) factors such as good visual appeal, great content that is keyword-rich and meta tags and alt tags. My focus is on the ways and means to help you get powerful backlinks that would increase your Google rank and in turn your business. Off-page optimization is done once the web pages have been well optimized and indexed. So let us talk about the second part, the off-page factors in detail.
How to attract traffic?
Once you have a great-looking website with excellent content, it would make your readers stay on your website long enough to find out more about what you have to offer them. Good content also pleases the crawling search engine spiders.
Half the job is done this way because both humans and the spider bots are looking for good, relevant content. But, however good your site content maybe, there is no use unless real people see it. How do you get people to look at your website?
The step to achieving this goal is to bring more people (traffic) to your site. For this to be done effectively, you need to use various link-building strategies to get backlinks to your website so as to increase your site visibility on the search engines.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are nothing but links between two websites in the sense that one website gets a link from another. There are reciprocal links too but we will discuss that later. Here we will talk about the one-way links or inbound links as they are called. The larger the number of quality backlinks you build to your site, the higher the position of your website on the search engines, let us say Google. So, when people search for a particular term or phrase that they want to know about, it is likely that your website comes up on the first page of Google, maybe in the first few positions depending on your competition provided the search term happens to be your keyword/s.
People then click through to your website and if they are happy at what they find there, they buy your products or services or join your mailing list as the case may be. This is how link building concept is explained in simple terms. The purpose of this hub is to give you the basic principles of link building and what quality backlinks are.
Link building methods should be used sensibly in order to attract more traffic to your website taking care to use ethical and honest methods and not spam the search engines. Many people do this by using automated tools and get thousands of backlinks instantly or from the same source or by purchasing them. Automation does help in a few cases but spamming means to break all rules and resort to unscrupulous ways and not follow the Google guidelines for backlinking.
Spamming
Any links that do not follow a natural pattern evokes suspicion in the scrutinizing eyes of Google and are not good for your business. When Google detects spamming sites, it ruthlessly bans the site by de-indexing it and your business will be gone from the Google listings forever. This is why diversified link building using ethical methods is emphasized time and again by SEO experts.
Of course, you will have to work many times harder to get back your Google rank by going over the same process of link building but this time rectifying the mistakes you did earlier that cost you a heavy price namely removal of your website from the listings.
So it is important to follow a regular and diverse pattern of building backlinks to your website. This will not only increase your reputation in the eyes of the search engine spiders but also attract more and more human traffic and gradually your sales will increase fulfilling your primary objective of making money online.
Types of link building
There are different methods of link building namely article marketing, directory submissions, profile creation, blog commenting, forum posting, RSS feed submission, social media marketing, video distribution and press release. The .edu and .gov links are very powerful links that help websites rank high in a short time.
This is the first of a series of hubs that I plan to write on link building. I came up with this idea of sharing what I know about link building based on my own work experience in the last five years. I will be writing about each of the link building methods in my future hubs. I am also testing to increase traffic to my hubs as well as get backlinks and will share my secret as soon as I see results. I hope that you find this hub and the others that are about to follow useful.
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