Quality Link Building
This guide is pretty dated so for an updated way to build links see our Local citation list.
Some search engines determine how important your website is based partially on the number of backlinks your site has. They figure that if you’re an important site–such as abc.com, ebay.com or amazon.com many other sites will naturally link to yours.
Link popularity is based on the theory that each site that links to your site believes that your site contains valuable content. Therefore, sites with more backlinks must be–according to search engines–better websites.
To some degree they are correct. Unfortunately, the policy of giving importance to links has lead to a scourge of link scams, link farms, mass paid link building, and link-scheme spammers.
The quest to increase ones backlinks has caused some to go overboard. These sites send out mass emails hoping to randomly exchange links with just about anybody. Worse, they exchange links with link farms–sites created specifically to link to other sites with no content of their own. This is a bad thing. Link farms are not only considered spam by search engines, but they hinder those looking for good information.
Definition of Backlinks
The number of websites that link to your site is the number of backlinks your website has. Nevertheless, having relevant links is important if you want to get into highly competitive categories.
Link Building: It’s Not About Quantity
It’s good to have a quantity of backlinks. However they should be quality relevant links.
So, what makes a quality link? Most importantly, your own judgment. If you believe that the website linking to yours has good content, is relevant and will bring targeted traffic to your website, then it is a good link.
More technically, a quality inbound link has the following features:
1. A quality link is relevant to your website.
2. A quality link is a text link that utilizes some variant of your keywords in the anchor text.
That being said, There are, however, bad links. That is, there are plenty of people that you should not link to or exchange links with.
The Right Way to Buzz and Build Links
Too many people put way too much importance on this one SEO factor and go to extremes to gain hundreds of backlinks. The right way to go about gaining quality links is the way search engines intended it to be: Create great content and people will naturally link to you.
Offer sticky tools, free white-papers, awesome articles, forums, a unique product, helpful downloadable programs or anything else that people would naturally recommend to their friends and you will never have to worry about requesting a link.
Now wasn’t that easy?
In the end, we recommend spending your valuable time on bettering your content rather than focusing on acquiring links.
The Other Right Way to Build Links
There’s another way to get quality links: submit to web directories. Directories, unlike search engines, are human-edited and can provide valuable static text links.
The three most important directories are Yahoo, Business.com and DMOZ. Yahoo is a bit expensive, but is usually worth it. DMOZ is free, but it can take several months for your website to be accepted. It also doesn’t hurt to register to a few smaller directories. In all cases, make sure to read the directory submission guidelines. Most directories will not accept your submission if you did not bother to read and follow their guidelines.
