Healthy Link Building 101
Posted : 01/3/10 10:29 PM
Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO, and yet so often it is done incorrectly. People read that having many inbound links coming to their website can help them rank better on the search engines and thereby increase their web traffic and hopefully their ROI, but many never take the time to fully read the webmaster guidelines and learn how they should be building links. Instead they send out email requests to other webmasters, submit to every link directory they can find, participate in artificial link swaps, and often times even purchase links. Then when their site is dropped and they lose traffic they wonder why. Well, in the next few posts we’re going to explore some of the common misconceptions about link building and look at some healthy white hat strategies to help any website build some quality back links.
First things first, before we continue you should read and have a good understanding of the major search engines ( Google, Yahoo, Bing ) webmaster guidelines. It is very important that you familiarize yourself with these guidelines so you understand how you should build your website and gain an understanding of what types of websites you be trying to get back links from. Here are links to these guidelines…
1. Google : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
2. Yahoo : http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html
3. Bing : http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-US&project=wl_webmasters
Once you’ve read and have a good understanding of those the next step is to truly gain an understanding of what a link is. So lets break it down….
<a href=”destination”>anchor text or image</a>
1.<a> : open anchor – used to define anchors and hyperlinks in html
2. href=”destination” : href attribute – defines the link address
3. anchor text or image : text or image that is click-able to take you to the href address
4. </a> : close anchor – closes the link
This is a link in its simplest form. There are many more elements which can be added that can affect the way the link is expressed and the value the link passes, but we’ll touch a little more on those in later posts. For now you should recognize that a link is really only meant to do one thing, and that is send a user from one point to another. This has and will always be the primary purpose of a link. A good link will direct the user to an appropriate page that corresponds with the content of the page and the links anchor text. So getting or placing links on pages with little or no traffic is worthless because the link doesn’t fulfill its main purpose, and hiding a link from users is worthless as well regardless of whether or not the search engines can find it because again it is not fulfilling its main purpose.
This concludes our first post on healthy link building. In our next few posts we’ll take a closer look at some of the common misconceptions about link building and begin to take a look at some healthy strategies to help any website get some quality back links. Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave comments.
Hi, this is a very nice post. Link building is a nice way to incerease traffic on a website. It results in exploring business. But links incoming or outgoing from a website, must be safe inks. All links needs a care as a lot of visitors will read them. one way linking is a better way. Some tips I read from http://www.seositecheckup.com, for build a safe link are very nice tips. This is also a very nice post::
http://www.seositecheckup.com/articles/13
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Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me.
Yes, we will be updating the blog with the next portion of our healthy link building segment shortly. We intended to have it up two weeks ago but due to an unexpected ( but welcome ) increase in business we’ve had to put it off. Check back in the next few days and we will have the next post up. And thank you to all of you for leaving comments.
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I’ve have done web design for 7 and have a few essential things for everyone. First, avoid complex url structures. This may be singing to the choir, but I can’t explain you how many websiets I come across with these simple issues. Oh and one other tip, Do not use animated GIFs.
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I think that in 2010 goes on, methods of on-page and off-page SEO will differ as we think it. I think we will see a transition towards user factors in deciding ranking results. That included with increased personal SERP results and we’ll be seeing a huge change of the searchers experience with Bing and the other SEs. Every search result won’t be created alike, take a look at things like user involvement, bounce time, bounce rate, etc… Focus on a better site all around, and I think you’ll see better results in 2010.
It might sound weird but the browser I use doesn’t show this post rightly… Are you sure this article has been tested under Google Chrome? Would be awesome if you could double check your code, although it may come from a bug on my side
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( Ferdinand Avino ) Thank you for your comment and I’m glad to hear you like this website. And to answer your question this website was custom designed and developed by MR Web Design and can’t be found anywhere else.
( colin ) Yes, this website has been tested in Google Chrome. For a while there was a minor CSS error with the search bar but other than that we have not noticed any errors. If you’re seeing more errors than that ( or any errors at all at this point ) try clearing your cache. If the problems persist please send us an email and we’ll look in to it further. Thank you very much for your input.
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You have tested it and writing form your personal experience or you find some information online?
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