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Link Building: The Basics of Links

LINK BUILDING, Links, links, links. Everyone says you need links to your website and they’re right. Here are just some of the benefits.

Links allow:

• Websites to reference information on another website (you want this to be your website. Don’t YOU?).

• Websites allow users to tell friends and family about the products they use, funny videos, interesting blog posts and their favorite websites.

• Websites allow search engines to find your site and the quantity and quality of those links help them rank your pages.

Links can do a LOT and that’s just scratching the surface. As the links to your website accumulate, they can grow exponentially. Once a few people are talking about you…more and more will start talking and that’s exactly what you want. But first, let’s talk about:

Search Engines & Links

You may already know that search engines put a significant amount of weight on the links that point to your various website pages. Here are a few of the things that they look at in evaluating those links:

QUANTITY

Generally speaking, the more links you have, the more authority search engines will see your site as having, giving you more weight in the search engines.

QUALITY

In addition to quantity, quality is crucial. Search engine bots are smart little critters who are looking for people and programs that are trying to GAME the system for links. For Example – Reciprocal Link Farms which are intended to manipulate  PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. To be an authority site, the more links you have from other authority sites, the better.

TEXT MATTERS

Search engines look at the text that appears in the links that come to your website. For example if links to your site say best darned website in the world, search engines will tend to believe it. Of course, this linking needs to be natural. If every link pointing to your site says best darned website in the world, this will look suspect.

But a Word of caution: Not all links, even if they are quality, count toward your search engine rankings. For example, search engines know that people comment on blogs and forums for the purpose of building links, so they may not give these much weight – but that shouldn’t keep you from using these methods. In addition, some authority sites use a “no follow” link which means that search engines won’t count the links…but they can still drive traffic, build your reputation and much more.

Link building serves many purposes by getting your website seen and driving traffic…plus the most important of all…links breed links, so go build them! If you are still not sold on link building check out the photo below which details of the Components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm.

Google is the biggest search engine on the planet and it’s where everyone who is anyone looks to make a presence online. So follow the keys steps above and begin creating links to your content and watch your presence launch into the stratosphere.

Interested in viewing other posts on how to build your profile and grow your online presence? I have countless informative articles within the Marketing and Personal Development sections of my blog. Check them out NOW!

About the Author: Herschel E. Chalk III

Herschel is a "MASTER IN THE ART OF LIVING," he makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing, to him he's always doing both.