subject: Link Building Strategies [print this page] It is important to build backlinks to your site in order to gain visibility in the search engine. There are two types of links including natural links and artificial links. Natural links are provided by other site voluntarily. Artificial links often appear in a large number suddenly. Too many reciprocal link will also cause the search engine to suspect that the link is artificial.
Building Natural Links to Your Site
Natural link building is the most effective search engine optimization technique. If a site link to you spontaneously, the backlink will have a better weigh. In addition, natural linking will help your website to rank on top of the search result page for long term. The more sites that links to your page, the more popular it will be on the search engine.
You can encourage people to link to your site by providing good content. If the content is high quality, people will want to put a link to the article page on their site to recommend it to their readers. If you own a blog, writing a good post will make people ping back to the permalink of the page. In this way, you will be able to generate natural links to your site.
Submitting articles to article directories can also create natural linking to your site. If the articles is informational, people will want to use it on their site. If they use it on their site, they will have to include the resource box which will have the links of your site and a link to the article page on the article directory. There are lots of high page rank blogs that often visit article directories to find new content. These people are not willing to create their own content and prefer to use free content from the article directories. If they use your article, you will have a one way link from a high page rank site.
The anchor text should varies to prevent duplication. Instead of obtaining the links rapidly, you should make the link grow in number gradually. You should minimize the reciprocal link in your link building campaign. If you want to exchange link, you should only point to reputable pages that are relevant to the theme of the site. You should avoid exchanging links from link farms, web rings or isolated websites.
To the search engine, the best links are links that are not purposely created. For example, a link in a directory that occur as a result of someone else submission is considered more valuable by the search engine. Google will assign a higher ranking for sites that are voluntarily linked to by other people because of their votes. Google rank the website because the people find the content useful and not because the webmaster had been working hard at finding backlink for his site.
Reciprocal Link Building
Several years ago, reciprocal links used to be one of the most effective strategies in search engine optimization. Nowadays, reciprocal linking has lesser influence. Despite that, reciprocal linking will help to improve the ranking of your site if it is done properly.
Getting one way links to your site can be difficult. Reciprocal link is much easier to obtain. Though reciprocal link can help the site ranking, you should not depend on them too much. It is recommended that the reciprocal links stands 25% of the inbound links.
You should only exchange link with site that are related to your theme. If the link is from an unrelated site, the link will seen as less valuable by the search engine. In fact, link from unrelated site are artificial to search engines. For example, if you have a garden site, it will be appropriate to exchange link with a do it yourself site since their niches are related with each other. However, it will not be a good idea to link a garden site with a cooking site. Since the sites are unrelated, the search engine will automatically know that the links are exchanged in order to increase page rank.
Hence, you should only exchange links with site that are related to the niche of your site in order to gain the best result.
When exchanging links, you should also consider whether the site will provide a good source of information for your visitors. Linking to informational site will be beneficial for your site ranking. The search engine will grant more authority to your site if it thinks you link to the site because of the benefits of your audience. In this way, you will be less likely to be penalized for reciprocal link.
Though reciprocal link is a second class link compare to one way link, they can still drive traffic to your website. Link exchange with high traffic site can drive a large amount of targeted visitors to your site. If the linking page drives traffic to your site, you will always reap some benefits from it.
Website Submission
Submitting your site to the directories will help to increase the backlinks. The titles and descriptions of the site can vary to prevent duplication. If the search engine detect the same titles and description in the directory listing, it will know that the listing is submitted by you and not someone else. The anchor text also plays an important role in the directory submission. In directory submission, the anchor text is the title of the site. Hence, the title of the site should be keyword optimized. You should aim for low competition keyword in the title so that it will be easier to rank on the search engine. The title should not be written in all capital letters. You only have to make the initial first letter as capital letter.
You should prepare at least three different keyword list. The keyword list can contain the same keyword but the sequence should be randomized. The keyword should be easy to find by the visitor. Using long tail keyword will help your website more easily find by the visitor than short tail keyword. The long tail keyword should contain more than three words. The description should be brief but describe all the content on the site.
