Link Building Basics

“Why do you think you should be on the top of the search page?”

By Kenneth Jackson and Keran Krane

Why incoming links are import? Because search engine spiders do only two things:

• Follow links
• Collect text

PERIOD! That’s it! The number and quality of the sites that link to you is all that the search engine has to determine the quality of the results returned to the user.

Links that improve search engine rankings will be those that the engines feel are a trustworthy indicators of quality. These can and will be different for every site. Not all links are equal.

Page Rank is only one component, and not the most important one. The more links you get from your own community the better.

Reciprocal links are not trusted, the “You link to my crap and I will link to your crap” trick may have worked in 1999 but the search engines figured that one out a long time ago.

To see your site links in Google type the following in the Google and Yahoo search field: Link:http://www.mywebsite.com

Places to get links

• Trade Associations
• .orgs
• Vertical Trade Directories
• Regional Directories
• Discounts for members of groups
• Buy them from high quality sites
• Find out who links to your competition
• .gov and .edu have a great deal of trust and are weighted higher

Link Building Best Practices

• Use “White Hat” tactics only.
• Social Bookmarking and other sites with “Editorial Ringer” such as Wikipedia can really help your sites overall ranking.
• Use article marketing where it makes sense. Submit your copy to media outlets with the links inside.
• When building links out of your site it is best to click on a description of the content the user will be redirected to rather than “Click Here”.
• Multimedia marketing – YouTube

What if you know of a quality site linking to you but not showing up in the engines?You can self submit pages that links to you to the search engines.

Why Should I Link to You?

• Create high quality authoritative original content that people want to link to naturally.
• Create tools and widgets the others can use.

5 Types of links

1. A link that helps with direct click traffic but doesn’t help your search rank
2. A link that helps your search rank
3. A link that does both
4. A link that does neither
5. A link that gets you banned by the search engines

What Will Get You in Trouble?

Bulk buying of links will get your site banned from the search engines. Google Webmaster Tools recently added a tool to report sites that are selling links.

Buy links for traffic not rank. Get into the search engine “Circle of Trust”

The deeper into a site the less likely the search engine will find your link.

As always Connections is happy to answer questions and assist you in any way we can to get your e-business up and running over the competition. Contact us atservice@ConnectionsIS.com.