Link Building is the Key Element towards Online Success
What is Link Building?
If you are in online business, you probably know that the success of your business in a great extent depends on your website position in search engines. The closer your link to the top of search results page is, the more visitors will click on it. Thus, for webmasters, it is important to optimize their websites for search engines and get as higher rank for their pages as possible.
Search engine optimization is the process of taking steps with your website to make it highly ranked by the search engines for your desired search terms.
The key element in getting a higher page rank is link building. Building high-quality links to your website that appear natural to search engines is one and most important step towards increasing your page rank.
Why Are Links So Important For Your Online Success?
Here are two main reasons:
1) Links make your website get indexed by search engines so they begin ranking your pages for target keywords. The higher rank in search engines you have, the more visitors (and sales) you’ll get.
2) Links are used by search engines to determine how relevant your web page is to search terms. By building links from relevant websites, you ensure that your web page gets indexed and ranked by search engines accordingly.
Inbound and Outbound Links
An inbound link is a link that points to your web page from a different page hosted on someone else’s website. An outbound link is located on your website and points to someone else’s page.
One Way and Reciprocal Links
One way link is a link that points from one web page to a page on someone else’s website. On the picture below there is a one way link between Page 1 and Page 2.
http://site1.com/page1.html -------------> http://site2.com/page2.html
Sometimes webmasters can agree to exchange links with each other.
Those links are called reciprocal. The picture below shows the reciprocal links between Page 1 and Page 2.
http://site1.com/page1.html -------------> http://site2.com/page2.html
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One way links have become more valuable than reciprocal links because the search engines “guess” about the secret agreement between the webmasters to exchange the links and can often discount reciprocal links in some degree. However, the reciprocal links can still be helpful if they are from most important pages.
Link Popularity and Link Reputation
When another website links to your web page, this will be used by search engines to vote for your website. Since search engines believe that some links are more important than others, you’ll need to understand the concepts of Link Popularity and Link Reputation in order to build a natural looking link portfolio for your website.
Link Popularity is the quantity of links pointing to your web page from other sites. It can also be determined as PageRank passed to your web page.
Some time ago, search engines ranked web pages depending on the number of links pointing to them. It was thought that good pages attracted more links.
Nowadays it is changed. Search engines don’t rely on the pure link popularity anymore. They evaluate links based on their importance. To establish your web page as important, you can:
1. Get a lot of links from other pages
2. Get several links from already important pages
3. Use both 1 and 2 methods.
However, a few links from other important pages is the most effective way to get a higher page rank because the pages linked from important pages are themselves considered to be important (of course, the more links from important pages you’ll have, the better). Just a few links from important pages can do more good than a ton of links from unimportant sites.
Link Reputation is connected with the type of keywords you used in your anchor text. It is used to determine relevance for certain search terms in the search engines.
So, you’ll have two tasks to accomplish for a successful link building strategy:
1) Get as many links from important pages as possible, and
2) Build relevance between your anchor text and target keywords phrases used in search engines.
