The Basics of Link Building for SEO

One of the most fundamental aspects of utilizing search engine optimization to push your website higher on the search engine results page is to establish more and more links to your site (and specific pages) from external sites. And not just any links, you want inbound links that are high value – the higher the better.

Get Links From External High Ranking Web Pages

So, what’s “high value”?

Google’s PageRank is a scale that ranks web pages from 0-10 (10 being the best). Although all links have some value, the best links are PageRank 3 and higher. Each ranking up the scale is 10x the value of the one below. So, a PageRank 3 is 10x more valuable than a PageRank 2. A PageRank 4 is 10x more valuable than a PageRank 3.

Get Links With The Right Keywords

One more important point is that the anchor text (underlined blue text that makes up the link) should contain the keywords you are attempting to rank higher. In short, that text is a description of your page from an external site and the search engines consider that description when determining what your web page is about. And if the link and anchor text is from a high value (high PageRank) external site, then that inbound link has even more SEO weight.

Examples Of How To Get Links With The Right Keywords

In years past, the way to get links was to plead with other webmasters to link to you.

Then, and especially now, a better way is to create content that is of such value and usefulness that other website owners and bloggers would “want” to link to your site to share your content with their readers.

However, this can be easier said than done. In short, it involves work: More specifically, it involves research and creativity to provide something valuable that is better than, or at least different than, what’s already readily available to your visitors elsewhere.

Here are some examples of how to get links for the keywords you need.

1) Research, write and publish some type of valuable content for the audience you are targeting. This could be some kind of review or comparison of products or services that are of interest to your potential and actual visitors.

It could also be timely research, such as quarterly or annual reviews of your industry.

Heck, even explaining and/or presenting complex or technical concepts in simple ways to make the material more readily understandable to others can be very desirable to visitors.  This can include presenting graphics, charts, videos, and other content that is uniquely instructive to others.

Such types of content could be a separate web page, or a downloadable report. (The latter having the benefit of building an email list, since giving away freebies in exchange for email addresses is a common occurrence).

If you are simply re-writing what’s already out there and readily available to your audience then you won’t create the impact you are hoping for. But if you provide content that is truly unique, relevant and valuable, then you will be rewarded with links from other sites.

And what anchor text will they use?

Although you cannot control the text others will use when linking to your site, it is likely that if you name the title of the content with keywords that are relevant to what you are targeting, then you will get a good portion of links with those same keywords.

2) For top-ranked sites that you want links from, you can suggest content to those sites that you’ll provide for free.  Alternatively, just ask what content they might suggest you provide. If you write blog posts or articles that they publish on their sites, this will help them to raise value for their readers. And you’ll minimally be able to include at least one link back to your own site – but more likely you can structure the content to contain more links.

3) Interview industry leaders over the phone, or in person and/or with a video camera. Publish the interviews as valuable content for your readers.  Furthermore, the person who is the subject of the interview may very well post links to your content, too, from their company website. As you establish more prominent interview subjects, you will be able to leverage those contacts to get even more prominent interview subjects.

4) Write an ebook that will be valuable to your readers and give it away for free. If it’s truly useful, then you’ll gain incoming links.

5) Linkbait is content specifically designed to generate inbound links. Although it could be stated that any content published with the intent of generating inbound links would be linkbait, this type of content is often characterized as sensational, controversial or provocative, specifically presented to move visitors emotionally and get them to react (positively or negatively) and write their own responses with links to your content.

Note On Building Inbound Links

Any of these examples need some initial promotion to get the link building started. If you have an email list, that’s a great way to get some publicity established.

Additionally, generating press releases about your content is another way to attract interest (and you don’t need an email list to do so).

If you can cultivate partnerships with other website owners and/or owners of email lists who will promote your content, this is great way to maximize the potential impact your content will make.

The point is to generate as much initial publicity as possible, which will get others to start linking to you, which of course will begin to drive new traffic to your content, and ideally, a percentage of the new traffic will also link to your site.

In an ideal world, you’d hit a home run with your link-building campaign, and this endeavor would result in an ever-expanding stream of natural link building and achieve a viral aspect.  The reality is that you will likely need to keep going up to bat to hit singles and doubles over and over to generate a large quantity of inbound links.  Regardless, these are tried and true strategies for growing inbound links and increasing your search engine results, which I have used for numerous other sites for more traffic and profit.

For more info on how link building fits into SEO, check out this short video on Driving Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle.

Link Building vs. Link Buying

Want to push your website higher in the search rankings?

Once your website features a quantity of useful, unique and desirable content (as well as ongoing content development), and the technical aspects of your on-site search engine optimization efforts are established, what’s next?

The majority of work will be developing inbound links.

(For more info on the relationship of content, on-site factors and link building, see the video Driving Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle).

Inbound Link Development

Here are some pointers on inbound link development:

♦ Link building is a never-ending process. Of course one simple, low-cost and practical way to develop content, foster community, generate traffic and build links (over time) is Generating Free Traffic with Blogs.

♦ Developing and providing software applications and services that others want to use, for free, is a powerful way to generate links. Even so, such would still benefit from promotion to prime the pump of inbound link generation.

♦ Employing linkbait, or content that is specifically established to generate inbound links, is a creative link building strategy to deliver valuable content to a given niche, which then drives traffic and links. It’s a component of garnering publicity.

♦ Publishing press releases via paid press release services, is not only good for getting the word out about your products or services, but it’s another fundamental way to establish links by themselves.

♦ “Buying links,” which has been more thoroughly covered in the post, Perspectives on Link Buying to Increase Search Ranking, is a questionable tactic, at best.

Inbound Link Buying

P.J. Fusco, at ClickZ, noted some of her experiences about link buying in her article titled, SEO Q&A. Here is an example she cites:

In one instance, a former client decided to start aggressively buying text links. The business quickly shot up the rankings, but then dropped abruptly when Google caught on to what it was doing. The company abandoned the tactic and eventually returned to its regular positioning…after the better part of a year. In the short term, it had what could be called success on the three terms for which they were buying links. But over the long term, it’s hard to call the tactic successful.

Here is how she sums up her perspective on link buying:

My best advice is stay legit, even if link building is a challenge and rival sites are taking shortcuts. Dollar for dollar, you can achieve higher, longer-lasting rankings by allocating your marketing money toward content generation and resource development that works well for building links within Google’s guidelines.

What is Link Bait?

Link bait refers to a component of search engine optimization. More specifically, it’s an inherent aspect of the third part of the SEO Triangle, which is depicted in the video, Driving Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle.

The third part of the SEO Triangle has to do with establishing inbound hyperlinks, which is what linkbaiting is all about.

Another way to describe link bait would be to refer to it as a publicity garnering process that results in other websites linking to your own.

Link Bait is About Generating Inbound Links

The reason that establishing and expanding the quantity and quality of inbound links to a website is valuable, is because inbound links are an important part of how search engines determine which websites to deliver to searchers.

Inbound links are a criteria that search engines evaluate to determine how relevant a website may be, for any given search query.

All things being equal, if a searcher is looking for information that might be answered by lots of different websites, the search engines will feature websites with the most inbound links at the top of the search queries.  In reality, the operation of search engines are more complex, but this example does illustrate the importance of inbound links.

Linkbait Examples

From a practical perspective, linkbaiting is not only creating unique and interesting content, such that others would want to link to it, link baiting  includes any publicity campaigns that can generate attention.

When an article, or video, or photo(s), or contest, or a useful resource, or some news item, or something controversial, or provocative, or something entertaining captures the imagination of bloggers and social media users, the result can be a cascading expansion of links created that point to a single web page.

Lots of inbound links not only raise the search relevance and authority of any specific page that is receiving all the attention, it also raises the exposure of the entire website in general. In other words, all the attention results in more traffic!

Link Bait Publicity

The necessity for establishing inbound links for SEO benefits, and the process of creating linkbait to achieve that, comprises a creative and public relations component of search engine optimization, that is a different skill set than the purely technical skills required for on-site optimization.

Some ways to gain initial exposure for potential content that is created for inbound link building is to:

♦ Publish Press Releases

♦ Gain the Attention of Influential Bloggers to Write About Your Content

♦ Through Email Marketing to Your Own Database

♦ Coordinate Joint Venture Email Campaigns with Others

Or in any way possible to bring your content to the attention of enough people who will start the process of inbound link propagation to your content.

Great Content!

Of course all this presupposes that your content is valuable enough that people will want to link to it. Although fantastic content, may or (more likely) may “not” be found by the public at large without concerted publicity, the best publicity in the world will not result in a successful linkbait campaign if the content does not inspire the online public to link to it and tell others about it.

Perspectives on Link Buying to Increase Search Ranking

Where do your sentiments align in terms of whether to “buy links” or “not to buy links” for search engine optimization purposes? Regardless of whether you have strong feelings one way or the other, or if you are somewhere in the middle, the following two posts that were published today from two high-profile SEO professionals, along with their related comments, provide a very well-rounded encapsulation of the involved perspectives.

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz started things off with his post Our Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads.

The post notes that buying paid links violates Google’s Quality Guidelines and refers to the related risks of doing so. It further states that as a company, SEOmoz no longer endorses the purchase of text links. The comments after the post reflect the divergent perspectives that surround this strategy.

Aaron Wall at SEObook weighed in with Link Buying: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

There’s a considerable amount of value in reading this post, and the first line is pretty sage all by itself:

“One thing I believe about online marketing (and SEO in particular) is that the more rigid the advice the lower its value.”

He goes on to state that

“Link buying is a tool which has various value levels depending what market you are in and how your company is positioned.”

“Paid links can be a stepping stone or part of your strategy, but rarely should they be your entire strategy.”

The post offers useful experience and examples as well as insight from Bing.

SEO Link Evaluation Factors

A vital component of search engine optimization revolves around links: especially establishing inbound links. (See Driving Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle for more info).

Rand Fishkin as SEOmoz has put together a compendium of factors related to the relative valuation of links: 17 Ways Search Engines Judge the Value of a Link.

Here are the points covered:

1) Internal vs. External
2) Anchor Text
3) PageRank
4) TrustRank
5) Domain Authority
6) Diversity of Sources
7) Uniqueness of Source + Target
8) Location on the Page
9) Topical Relevance
10) Content & Context Assessment
11) Geographic Location
12) Use of Rel=”Nofollow”
13) Link Type
14) Other Link Targets on the Source Page
15) Domain, Page & Link-Specific Penalties
16) Content/Embed Patterns
17) Temporal / Historical Data

Two Fundamentals of Creative Link Building

Inbound links are an important component of search engine optimization (SEO) and increasing your website’s profile on the Internet. (For more info, see the third part of the triangle in the video Driving Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle).

SEO, and particularly the process of building inbound links, is better approached via creative thinking. Once you understand the mechanics of on-page optimization, including the use of pertinent keyword title tags, then the bigger gains are a result of engendering more links to your website.

Although the concept of creating your own inbound links via blog commenting, forum signatures, article distribution, and other manual repetitive processes at least allows you to generate some activity relatively quickly, it is labor intensive. And even if you outsource the work, a chunk of it will only result in low quality links.

Creative Inbound Link Building

A more efficient and effective strategy is to create content that attracts links. Although that may seem to be a trite and oft-repeated statement, what that statement fails to reflect is the necessity to get that content in front of enough readers and influencers to get the link-building stream flowing.

Creative inbound link building is a mix of public relations, marketing, art and of course is an important component of SEO.

The idea of of creative link building is that the greatest amount of inbound links will result from your most broadly respected content. This is not a one-size-fits-all strategy or an automated process. But to say that it is solely a result of “building great content” would miss the fact that all the best content in the world will not generate any links if no one knows about it.

Conversely, a brilliantly conceived and executed publicity strategy to get your content recognized will be of little value if the content itself is mundane.

2 Fundamentals of Creative Link Building

To emphasize, here are the two fundamental components to creative link building:

1) Create content that is valuable and link worthy

2) Promote that content to establish an ever-expanding wave of cascading inbound link-building

Neither point will be as effective without the other.

Race Cars and Link Building

Great content without promotion would be somewhat analogous to building a high-performance race car that has no gas in the tank. In theory, it could be the fastest car in the world, but it will remain on the sidelines and in obscurity until it gets fueled up and performs in the real world of competitive racing.

In other words, high quality content is essential to a link-building campaign in the same way that a high-performance car is necessary to win races.  But like a race car, it will not achieve desired results without marketing and publicity as the fuel to drive it into the ranks of the winner’s circle.

Creative Link Building Suggestions

Here are some questions to contemplate in relation to the two fundamentals noted above.

• What types of content in your industry are in demand?
• Is there some industry problem you can solve?
• What original research can you deliver?
• What kinds of online and/or software tools would be useful to your industry?

Once you have such content, here are some additional questions to contemplate in terms of promoting it.

• Where can this content be placed to generate attention?
• What websites, blogs, magazines or other (online and offline) media are central to your industry?
• Would a social media strategy help to promote this content?
• Who are some of the primary industry influencers?
  • How can you get your content in front of them?
  • Are their joint venture email (or other) opportunities?
• Would this content benefit from paid press releases for general promotion?
• Is the content so valuable that it could benefit from pay-per-click advertising?

The whole point here is that the two-fold process of creating the right content and then promoting it to the right public is not a mechanical strategy and the more creative energy you can apply to it, the more success you will achieve.

SEO and Natural Linking

If you are overly enthusiastic for a short spurt of time about the development of your inbound linking efforts, how much will that really help you?  Aaron Wall (SEObook) has offered a post and graphic titled, What is a Natural Link Growth Profile? on this subject.  Aaron compares the patterns of “Spiky,” “Linear” and “Geometric” link growth and presents the SEO ramifications for each, as well as caveats.  An undercurrent to the post, and to SEO in general, is the simplicity of presenting a link profile that would reflect a growth over time that would be reasonably deemed “natural.”