Off page SEO: Link Building Basics
Published May 01, 2010 - RSS/XML Feed RSS
 
One of the most difficult parts of increasing your page rank is building high-quality incoming links. After all, it’s the only thing SEO practice which requires you to have the cooperation of someone else in order to make it work. But with the right strategy, and a little patience, you can build incoming links that will increase the value of your site in the eyes of the search engines. This article will provide you with the basics of link building which will help you to get the most out of the connections which you establish with other sites.

Building Natural Looking Links

One of the things that can get you into hot water with the search engines is being labeled as a spam site. Spam sites build links through unnatural means and if your site appears to be building links in this way, your site’s SEO will suffer. The following are some basic link building principles which will keep your site from appearing as a spam site:

       ·         Build 15-20 links a day Only

Spam sites try to “trick” the search engines by adding hundreds or even thousands of back links in one day. So as you’re working on your link building strategy, limit your link accumulation to no more than 20 links per day.

       ·         Keep Link Swapping to a Minimum

Most unnatural link building strategies (those used by link farms etc) are built using reciprocal linking strategies. So while it can be good to swap links with a site, be sure that you’re not making this your only strategy for acquiring links.

       ·         Use Different Text in Your Links

Since spam sites normally send out hundreds or thousands of links at a time, they normally use identical texts which they copy and paste for the sake of link swapping or posting on content delivery sites. While it’s important to have your main keywords used in your link text, make sure that you have several different variations or secondary keywords for building links.

       ·         Keep Your Connections Relevant

Spam sites are more interested in building a lot of links fast than they are in using those links to add value to another site or to attract qualified traffic. This means they’ll link to sites which are irrelevant to the content of their site, simply for the sage of building a large number of links. So to keep your site from being labeled as a spam site, keep your connections relevant to the content of your site.

Creating Valuable and Relevant Links

In addition to the above basic principles, there are four things that you can do to ensure that your link building strategy is adding value to your site and helping to increase your relevance with the search engines:

       1.       Keep Your URL’s Consistent

In order to make sure that the search engines are giving you full credit for your links, you have to show that they’re all coming back to the same URL. And believe it or not, all of the below URLs are considered to be different and will not be credited to the same web page:

http://www.demo.com

http://demo.com

http://www.demo.com/

http://www.demo.com/index

In other words, if you build four incoming links using the above URLs, you don’t get the credit of four new back links to your home page URL. Instead, you get the credit of one link credited to each separate URL. So using consistent URL code can make a big difference in the effectiveness of your link building.

       2.       Use Your Primary Keywords in Your Anchor Text

Choose about a half dozen keyword variations for your site and mix them up when you build links from other sites to your site. For example, if the theme of your site is: strength training, you could also use the following keyword variations to build incoming links:

       ·         Strength Training Website

       ·         Strength Training Article

       ·         Strength Building Tips

       ·         Beginner Strength Training
 
       3.       Avoid No Follow Tags

Sites which use “no follow tags” in their outgoing link code are basically telling the search engines that any outgoing links from that site. This means that if you put forth a lot of effort building back links with these kinds of sites, you still aren’t going to get any credit in doing so. The best way to indentify a no follow tag is to view the source code of a web site and look for the words “no follow” in the code of their outgoing links.

       4.       Provide Valuable Content to Niche Sites

Content is the life blood of the internet, and it’s the thing which gives your site the most value to visitors. Since the job of the search engines is to connect customers with valuable content, making that your number one goal will always help you to stay in good graces with the search engines. This means that as you’re building links to other sites, you’re best off doing it by providing a link to valuable content or by having an article published on a website within your niche. This is why article marketing is one of the best way to build links to your site. Most article marketing sites give the option of letting people publish your articles on their sites, which is a great way to get relevant back links to your website.

Conclusion

Remember above all that link building and search engine optimization has to be done naturally and that you’re ultimately marketing to people, not search engines. As long as you focus on this, you’ll have the same goal in mind as the search engines and your SEO efforts will pay off.

Article Marketing Sites

EzineArticles.com

GoArticles.com

ArticlesBase.com

Buzzle.com

ArticleCity.com

ArticleDashboard.com

SearchWarp.com

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