Link Building – The Core of SEO

Link popularity is defined as the number of links that point to your web site from other sites on the Internet. Link building is considered very important for increasing online business popularity. In simpler terms its how much you are known on the web. Every link that points to your web site is like a vote in your favor. The more votes you get, the more trust search engines develop for your web site. However quality matters more than quantity, so it helps more to get links from sites which are considered to be trusted seed sites like Yahoo Directory, Wikipedia and DMOZ. Furthermore for two ways link exchange it’s considered more important to get a link back from a similar category web site. Primarily there are 3 types of links that you can establish on the web:

One way links – One way links are links pointing to your web site without getting connected back to the web site. One way links are also called inbound links. These are valued more than other types of links since the probability of its being a totally sincere vote of greater. If other web sites find your web site worthy and important for some topic/information, they might provide you a one way link. Links got through article marketing, PR marketing and Blogs generally come under this category.

Two way links – or reciprocal links are based on a mutual agreement between 2 sites with similar business interests, in order to increase link popularity and web site traffic. When going for reciprocal links one must consider three things –

a. How trusted is that domain?
b. If or not it belongs to the same category?
c. Page rank of the linking page?

How to go about getting reciprocal links – Well it’s not easy but it’s not that difficult either. Once you come across a web site worth linking, you can simply reach them and ask if they would like to go for a reciprocal link exchange with yours.

Three way links – In three-way link building can be comprehended as reciprocal link exchange between three sites. A website A links with website B; B instead of connecting back to A, connects to another web site C; Web site C then connects back to web site A. In normal reciprocal link exchange, the involved web sites exchange links. Search engine algorithms are becoming intelligent day by day, and they can easily find that out. So the reciprocated links might not be weighted for the maximum value.
Benefits of link building:

• Direct Traffic – Following link from trusted sites is one of the most effective means for people in finding new web sites. if your website has links on other authority websites on the net, that can bring you lots of relevant traffic

• Links develop user trust – If a user sees your website link on other respected websites on the web, they are likely to develop more trust for your product or service. That will also have an direct impact on your conversion rates

• Increased PR – It’s no more a secret now that Google page rank largely depends on the incoming links to a webpage/website. Page rank itself helps in making first impression for your website in your community.

• Search Engine Trust – As it been mentioned before, in-coming links are considered as votes in favor of your website. They help search engines assess your website relevancy for the linked terms and ultimately your business keyword. A link from Wikipedia or Yahoo directory will certainly be considered highly important and valued heavily in all major search engines.

• Free advertising – Unless you buy links purposefully, it’s a free advertising for you.

Quality link-building helps in many ways. It gets you traffic from the linking web sites, it is one of the many parameters for serps ranking plus you get a boost in your web site page ranks. If you own an online business or planning to start one, ‘link building’ is something that you cannot afford to neglect. However remember, link building involves lots of hard work and time and there are no short-cuts.