How to build web links?

Link building: Why do I need it?

The internet can be such a strange creature.

You’d be surprised to know about websites that have been carefully planned, with well thought out key words, regularly updated content that is well written and fresh but never get a strong enough ranking in search engines. On the other hand, you have probably visited websites with sparsely written content that enjoy a high search engine ranking.

Fortunately for many website owners, the answer is easily available – the difference lies in the links. 

The number of links that point back to your site plays a big part in how it will rank in many search engines. Of course, content is also important in getting a good search engine ranking but it cannot be discounted that a good set of links can help in achieving the ranking that you want for your website.

Why are links so important and why should link building be an indispensable part of any internet marketing strategy? Links help because it increases the level of visibility of your website to search engine crawlers.

Think of links as road signs that give users/visitors direction to other websites. Among these users are search engine crawlers. Just like road signs, the more there are pointing to your site, the easier it is to find your site and for crawlers to index it for search engines.
Links are also a good barometer for content relevance. Links that point to your website’s pages will be placed inside websites with similar or related content. Crawlers’ algorithm’s will then use the links to determine the relationship of your site to other websites based on the relevance of the topics from these related sites. Google’s PageRank also uses this relevance for its ranking method. PageRank will place a value to your website by evaluating the number of links from other websites that point to your site. Thus, the more links going to your site, the better its ranking.

Of course, not all links are equally important. Some are more crucial than others in helping you build a good enough set of links that will propel your website through the search engine rankings. It is a good idea to also know these non-important links when going through the task of link building so you can discern which ones are important to you and discard the others. It makes your work much simpler and more focused.

For example, the links contained in pages that are not in the index will have no value in terms of ranking. Crawlers will not be able to read these pages and will obviously not be able to see the link to your site.

Link farms should also be avoided. Link farms are websites that are devised to create thousands of links through reciprocal exchanges. Search engines do not like link farms and any link discovered that were produced by these entities will be ignored, so it won’t help in building your ranking.

Finally, reciprocal links should be given second thoughts. Even though these types of links were considered a helpful tool before, more and more experts are saying that in terms of search engine optimization, these do not have a real effect. Reciprocal links are a bit of a gray area though. Even if it may not have much of a bearing in improving your search engine ranking, it can help in terms of increasing traffic to your website.