24 December 2009
Link Building is without a doubt one of the most important factors when optimising any website and is a subject I can talk for hours on end.

There are lots of articles out there on the subject and lots of different opinions on how to obtain top quality links. All I can do is offer my spin on the subject. So where do I begin?

WHY LINK BUILD?

Link building is important as each link that points to your site is like a thumbs up from the other site saying your site is a good resource. Basically the more thumbs up you get the higher your website will rank. Sounds simple doesnt it?

Back in the day before search evolved into the clever little beast it is today, it really was as simple as that, and those black hatters out there went away and obtained links from everywhere under the sun in a bid to obtain high rankings for their own sites and clients sites. They didn't care where the links came from and it became a big battle as to who could obtain the most links. This couldn't continue so Google introduced the PageRank Algorithm which made link building more of a skill, and gave more weight to links that were actually relevant to the websites they were pointing to.

Although some people still argue that quantity still out weighs quality, Google still claims that it doesn't so I will keep my post in line with Googles thoughts and save the other argument for a later post. Getting back to it, it's important to obtain relevant links to your website in order to gain higher page rank which will in turn raise your rankings. This is why it's important to link build, as without lots of top quality and relevant links pointing to your website, you may as well give up (unless your website is extremly niche that is, and by extremely niche im talking about a website that is about pink and gold spotty dogs with only one leg, for example).

WHAT ARE MY LINKING OPTIONS?

There are many different types of links out there and I have listed a few of them below. I will go into details on all of them in future posts:

One Way Links - Links that point to you but you dont link back
Reciprocal Links - Links whereby somebody links to you and you link back to them
Social Bookmarking Links - Links obtained through social media
Article/Press Release - One way links obtained through articles and press releases
Link Baiting - Links obtained through offering something useful to the end user

Link Building is without doubt a skill that any SEO must be good at, as it's extremely difficult. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of relationship skills. It isn't something that is going to go away so check back here for future posts on the various types of links, as listed above.