If your website was built for visitors, then consider the links sort of votes from both your visitors and peers. Whenever a link is sent to your site, it is a message being said to search engines that “this” site is worth linking to for some reason. These links, or “votes”, can come from a variety of sources, both organic and nonorganic, and can be sent from a variety of online services such as YouTube, blogs, social media sites, and more.
Link building is an SEO tactic used to help increase ranks by increasing the external links pointing back to their site. There are a variety of simple and complex link building strategies, as well as a number of services that website owners use to help diversify and increase their backlinks.
Why is it important?
As mentioned earlier, links are “votes” that tell search engines such as Google and Yahoo that your site is trusted and worth linking back to. High ranked back links, as in links from PR 1 sites, can make an immense difference in a websites ranking. The more quality backlinks a site has, the better it looks to Google and other search engines, which means the higher it is ranked.
When a site is ranked higher on search engines then the traffic flow drastically increases, as do profits. The fact that a good link building strategy can mean the difference between PR4 and PR1 sites makes it an essential practice for SEO.
Backlinks are also important because they allow you to use anchor text. Anchor text is simply keywords hyperlinked with your site’s URL. They are amazing for targeted rank increases for specific keywords. Lastly, backlinks help build trust not just for search engines, but for users as well. If you are selling baby products, then a backlink from popular baby forums and baby blogs will go a lot farther than a backlink from some unrelated site, or even no backlink at all!
Types of links
Knowing the various types of links will help you understand more about link building structures and how to create a link building strategy for your sites. First off there are three types of links: natural, outreach, and manual backlinks.
Natural backlinks – These links are created by sites and blogs that link back to you due to your content. This requires absolutely no work from you, and is why having good content is crucial. You can curate them by promoting your content on social platforms.
Outreach backlinks – These types of backlinks are created usually by you emailing a blogger or site owner and requesting them to link back to your content. Additionally, directory submission also falls under this category. Often times you may have to do some convincing for other blogs and sites to link to you, and they may even request that you give them a reciprocal link, or submit an article yourself that will link back to your site.
Manual backlinks – these backlinks are created by the SEO user themselves, requiring them to go out to the thousands of various blogs and sites to manually post comments and use the links in the comments. Additionally forum posts and signatures are used, as well as user profiles.
In Closing: Don’t Overdo Link Building!
In addition to having diversity in links you build, you shouldn’t build hundreds each day; this is an obvious attempt to manipulate search rankings. Build slowly, working on manifesting fruitful link relationships as opposed to spamming comments everywhere.
Author – Roger Kowalewski is a freelance writer and domain developer from Indiana. You can follow him on Google+.