What is Link Building?
Link building is anything you do to get links to a web page. The goal of building links to a web page is to generate traffic to that page. There are two ways this can happen. 1) Direct Click Traffic: when someone clicks a link from another page to your page. 2) Better Search Engine Rankings: and this is why we build links.
How does Building Links make your site rank better?
There are two major ways that link building will help your site rank better.
First, think of a link as a vote or endorsement for your page. When someone links to your site they are trying to show someone how to get there because it will be of value to their audience. The search engines know this and therefore have placed a high value on incoming links as a factor when ranking pages.
Second, but more importantly is anchor text. Anchor text is the visible text in a link. Since a link is a vote... the anchor text is like a quick description. Now the search engines can see that page (A) voted for your page using the anchor text they think your page is about. One anchor text link by itself will not have much of an effect. But the same or similar anchor text from diverse sources will have a huge impact on your rankings for those keywords.
So, if you want to boost your rankings for any given keyword phrase you need to get anchor text links using that keyword phrase. For example: if you want your homepage to rank better for "(your city) real estate" get some links to that page with that phrase as the anchor text.
You can also get the same page to rank for various keyword phrases by getting more anchor text links with those other phrases.
Important note: If all your links are anchor text optimized it can have a negative effect. So, don't pass up a link opportunity just because you can't get the anchor text you want. It looks natural to the search engine spiders to find links with anchor text like: website, www.yoursite.com, here, etc.
More About Links
Quality: Some links are better than others. The quality of a link is really the quality of the site the link is on. Some indicators of quality are: high page rank, topical relevance, linking site ranks high for similar keywords. Other things to consider are how many links are on the page, how close your link is to the top, is your link in the content area(good) or in the footer(not so good).
Things to Consider when Building Links
* The linking page must be indexed by the search engine. To check this: copy the url of the page, paste it into the search engine and do a search. If the page shows up in the results it's good.
* Image links have no anchor text and provide no keyword specific value.
* Most redirects have no value. Exceptions: Yahoo Directory redirects are OK, and 301 or permanent redirects are also good.
Page Rank(PR) is not a major issue when building links. The important thing is that the page is indexed.
NoFollow is a behind the scenes code attached to some links to stop the flow of PR. My belief is that the nofollow tag just stops PR and may not stop the topical reputation passed from an anchor text link. Most but not all blogs and forums have a nofollow on all outgoing links. I usually don't worry to much about this when link building and recommend you do the same.
Unnatural Links
Links Farms or sites made just to create links can have a negative or no effect. Generally the search engines won't penalize a site for who links to them. What they might do is treat links to your site with more scrutiny if they find a lot of link farms pointing to your site. Do not participate in link farms.
Payed Links that are there just to pass PR are not liked at all by the search engines. They are developing ways of detecting payed links and payed links are generally devalued. Also if your site is found getting payed links for PR purposes they may devalue some of your other links and treat new links with more scrutiny. It is recommended that you do not buy links for ranking purposes, if you are buying links it should be for direct traffic or Branding and not for PR or anchor text reputation.
Reciprocal Links or link exchanges are in the grey area at the moment. These can have a negative effect if done in excess or if done with bad neighborhoods. If a potential link partner site is reciprocal linking with a lot of other sites you might want to reconsider a link exchange. If a site has PR on all pages except the link page you might want to reconsider.
Who you link to can trigger penalties. Generally one or two bad links won't hurt you site, but if your site is linking to a lot of bad neighborhoods your site might already have a penalty.
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