Basic SEO: Part 2 - Link Building
Link building
After letting the search engines know your site exists, the next major part in promoting your website - apart from traditional offline promotion such as adding your web address to all of your printed marketing flyers, posters, letterheads etc. - is link building.
Link building is one of the most important factors in getting your website found. It’s simply getting links from other websites to yours. Search engines such as Google see a link from another website to yours as a vote for your site. The more links you can get to your website, the more votes it gets. In the simplest terms - taking all other SEO factors out of the equation - if you get more votes than a competitor, you come higher up in the search engine rankings.
You need to be cautious however, as it’s not just the quantity of links that is important but also the quality. A link from a page or site about the same subject as yours is far better than a link from a site that’s nothing to do with your industry or field - i.e. don’t get links from unreputable websites as it will be detrimental in the long run. Another aspect of this is the anchor or link text on website pointing to yours. This is the text which is the actual link. If the anchor text includes the keywords you are aiming for, it is an even better ‘vote’ for your site. For example, if you sell ’straight bananas’, then try and get the anchor text on the website that links to yours to say ’straight bananas’. The main ways to get links are:
- Submitting your site to web directories and forum
- Reciprocal linking - exchanging links with websites with similar or related content.
- Submit articles in forums and social networking sites
If your site has great content, maybe you’re a specialist in your field and have great stuff in your site, then people will link to it anyway hopefully - great content is the key to good SEO!
NEXT: Basic SEO: Part3 - Keywords and Key Phrases >>
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:15 am
Great article. It’s brief and to the point. I’d like to add a little about the anchor text when building links. It’s not recommended to use the same anchor text for all the links. The anchor text should vary to make the links look natural. The majority of links (about 60%) should have the primary keywords in the anchor text, the next set (about 30%) should have the secondary keywords in the anchor text and lastly, 10% of the links should have the primaty set of keywords in the anchor text.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:23 am
Hi Julia, Good point about alternating the keywords in links as obviously people will have more than one keyword or phrase, Cheers, Jamessy