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Link Building

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Ever since Larry Page & Sergey Brin wrote their famous 1998 paper entitled “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web” the concept of getting incoming links to your website became the lifeblood of the World Wide Web.

People were confused about the details for years though, and even today Google perpetuates this confusion by claiming that this system of web page voting called “PageRank” is just one of over 100  different factors that make up the Search Engine ranking algorithms that we use daily while googling.

Nonetheless, any website that manages to get a majority of the websites using the same keywords to publish a link to it will easily become one of the very top listings on the search results page (SERPS) for those keywords.

It’s not exactly rocket science when you’ve got the facts straight.

Relevance and Dominance, better known as quantity and quality of the incoming links is all that it really ever comes down to. Big G, at least, computes the relevance (quality) by keeping the searches constrained to verbatim keywords, and then grouping those keywords together with a process called Latent Semantic Imaging. (LSI) 

There’s very little you can do to make your website Relevant to more searches (and therefore get more visitors) other than adding more pages on your website targeting more and more keywords that are related.

As for Dominance, (the quantity of links) there are uncountable ways to get links to your site. I’ll go over the most popular methods below, with a brief explanation of their effectiveness. Using one or more of these methods is referred to as “Link Building,” and doing some form of this is absolutely necessary to any webmaster who wishes to receive traffic from search engines like Google.

1. Simply providing good content.

Those who have great content on their website will find that many people will be more than happy to link to them automatically. Have you ever run across a great resource online that you wanted to tell others about from your website or blog? It happens all the time and should be the ultimate goal of every webmaster to offer something like that. This can be the most effective method if you truly do come up with stellar content. (But this is a rare thing indeed these days.)

2. Link Swapping.

“I’ll scratch your back If you scratch mine…” Two or more webmasters meet thru email or online somewhere and see that each other’s sites are relative to each others. They then offer to place a link to each other’s sites in a fair exchange, raising each other up in the rankings at the same time. This has been the easiest and most common form of link building since the turn of the millennium, but it’s getting harder now as Google is getting smarter. To make this work now you have to have three or more link to each other in a circle, (a to b, b to c, c to a) while ensuring that the themes are more closely related than ever before.

3. Purchasing Links.

Even easier for those with a large budget, simply purchasing relevant, one-way links has been a mainstay of businesses and those in a hurry for years. However, Google’s getting smarter about this, too, and its days are likely numbered unless there is absolutely no record of the transaction to be found online anywhere.

4. Article Marketing.

A great way to get lots of incoming links from placing your content out all over the web. It can be very effective, but you have to write or have written for you an article to give away freely. The better quality the article, the more people will publish it and link back to your site. We’ve given this technique a whole ingredient page because it is so effective and popular right now.

5. Forum Posting.

Posting a response to someone else’s Bulletin board topic while including a link back to your site can be a neat trick and a very useful method for advertising your product or website. It may sound a little bit like cheating, but can be done ethically to bring in tons of quality links that get indexed very quickly. We’ve included this technique on the “other off-site marketing” ingredient page because it is so effective and popular right now.

6. Social Bookmarking.

Have you used one of those “tagging” sites like Del.icio.us or Technorati yet? They are growing in popularity every day, but are nothing more than human-edited bookmark files. Just like your favorites folder, they are links that you keep and put in order yourself, except these are shared for everyone, and assigned “Tags,” which are nothing more than keywords. So instead of Google linking a website to a keyword, Social bookmarking sites tap humans to do all the hard work. (Sounds like backwards progression to me…) Nonetheless, it’s really caught on with the younger generation and internet marketers seeking to add their own sites to the listings as well. We’ve given this technique a whole ingredient page because it is so effective and popular these days.

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