LINK BUILDING

A brief link building definition is:    
The process of establishing
relevant, inbound links to your
website which help your website achieve higher ranking with the major search engines and drive targeted traffic to your site.

When our clients ask us to define link building, we take great care to explain that it is not the quantity of inbound links to your site that helps you rank well but rather the quality of those links. There are a ton of unethical link building companies out there which employ some pretty shady practices which end up hurting your website instead of helping it.

Some of these unethical methods include:

Automated spam responses to blog posts.
Spamming all sorts of web forums with bogus responses that include links to your site.
Creating websites solely for the purpose of linking to other sites. These are sometimes referred to as “spam directories.”

The search engines are far more sophisticated than they once were and are engineered to sniff out these and other ‘black hat’ SEO practices. If the search engine crawlers determine that a site has employed unethical link building practices to achieve a higher ranking, they will penalize your site severely and irrevocably bury your site making it almost impossible to find through the search engines.

Only permanent, relevant links from established sites that engage in ethical link building practices will help your site achieve better rankings with the major search engines and drive targeted traffic to your site. Link building is a key facet of any successful Internet marketing strategy because if your site features relevant, factual information that is written well, the administrators of other websites will want to link to your site because it offers their readers something of interest and value.

There are no shortcuts in a successful link building campaign and even when it is done properly, you should not expect to reap the benefits of link building overnight. Patience and persistence are the keys because it can take time to build links from credible sources. While link building is a key element of an Internet marketing strategy, link building alone will not help your site achieve its natural ranking with the search engines. Only if link building is incorporated in a comprehensive search engine optimization approach will your site gain the full benefits from links from other sites and achieve its potential.

Ø     What is a Quality Link?

In my opinion, any link that is responsible for targeted traffic to your website is a quality link. While it helps when the link passes value, that is not always the victory link. I have had links that I have proven to pass zero value in search engines, yet has brought thousands of visitors via direct traffic from that link. This specific example happened to be a forum link.
Still, in most cases the goal for many who are building links is to get higher rankings in the search engines. So how do you know which links pass value? Well, the short answer is that you don’t. There is actually no way to know exactly what links are going to pass value. That is, until you test them out for yourself and get real results. Many times the links that you think will pass the most value never really do. Sometimes there is just no rhyme or reason to why links do not pass value.

Ø     Testing Link Value

The only way to know for sure how well a link is going to work for you in terms of search engine rankings, is to test various links. In other words, you will need to build links to your websites and then test the results of the links. Considering that the whole point is to increase rankings, that would be the only way to truly measure the success of the link.
Note: This can only work if you are trying to test link directories, blog comments, forum comments, etc. It would have to be the type of link you can obtain easily over and over again. The problem with this, is that those links usually do not have much value. Still, there are some that do, and this is how you figure out which ones have that value I keep talking about.
Step 1: Build a handful of websites, with around 10 pages of good content, then let them sit for a few weeks. This can be on whatever niche you want, and you can build them however you want – but you need to get them to the point to where they are just sitting. We want to make sure that any results that change via the SERPS is from the links that will be built to these sites in the future. They can even be free wordpress blogs or whatever. It doesn’t matter.
Step 2: Build 1 link per site (or a group of links, from the same source). It must only be 1 link, so you will know for sure if that link had any effect on your rankings or results. This can be forums, blog comments, article directories, paid link directories, free link directories, social bookmarking, or any other method you may use.
Step 3: Wait, and analyze the results.
Step 4: Rinse and repeat. This time with a different link for each site. Sometimes, it can be a combination of different links that help to obtain better rankings.
Bonus: You will be able to figure out which link opportunities bring in the most direct traffic. Of course, there are a lot of variables. It will depend a lot on the topic of the website.
I highly recommend that you test this in very non competitive niches. The reason being, is because most of these link opportunities are not likely to carry much weight. The idea behind this approach is to figure out which ones do carry the weight. It may only be 1 out of 100. If you can use that 1 link source for all your sites, and you learn about 1 gem every week, then eventually your going to have some very good starter links for whenever you build a new website.

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