Some Link Building Basics

What are links from online marketing perspective?

When a webpage on the internet connects to another webpage by a hyperlink, it is called a link. A website has both internal as well as external links. Internal links bind all the pages of a website together and external links binds the website with the rest of the web. A website can also link to other domains on the web using links. Such links are called outgoing links.

Why are links important?

Website users can go from one page or website to another by following links. In the same way, search engines come to know about new pages and websites by following links. Normally people place links to other websites to provide more reference to their site visitors. Thus, if more no. of websites are linking to a particular website, it means that the linked website would be really good or important. On the basis of this logic, search engines provide value to the no. of links that a webpage has.

What kind of links are given importance?

Over the period of time, search engines like Google have been updating their algorithms to justly award the deserving websites and devalue any efforts to artificially inflate a website’s rankings using certain techniques which includes creating some kinds of Links.

The type of links which are not given that much of value are mentioned below:

- Reciprocal links: When two websites link to each other (reciprocate links).

- Paid links: When links are bought on certain paid directories and websites.

- Links from irrelevant websites etc.,: Links are from webpages and websites which are not relevant to a particular website.

The links that are given value now are non reciprocal links from industry relevant websites. Non reciprocal links are one way links that a website gets without providing a link back (reciprocating) to the linking website. Optimized anchor texts (text in links) and descriptions in such links further enhance the value as they inform the search engines and the human visitors what the linked page is all about.

Even links from blogs, social community websites carry value as they help in getting good amount of focused traffic to a website. Links from text based pages such as articles are also given a lot of value.

At the same time there are some kinds of links which can damage the performance of your website on search engines. These are links from link farms, Free for all directories (also called FFAs) and such websites/directories. Not only getting links from such websites, but also providing a link to them (external links) is equally fatal. Such websites spam search engine’s index.

How should a good Link Building Strategy be?

A good Link Building strategy should focus on not only obtaining non reciprocal, industry relevant links from text and non text pages, but also optimizing the website for the human visitors in such a way that your target audience and other websites in your sphere automatically start linking to it. This will help in building links the way they are naturally made on the web. Such strategy will help your website to get good traffic and rankings on search engines for the keywords relevant to your website.