The process of link building involves getting external websites to link their pages to yours. This results in a higher SEO ranking for your website. It is a long and difficult process, because all links have different values. A link from a big company’s website like the NY Times will have more impact on the search engines’ results than a link from a newer or smaller website.
The Basics of Link Building:
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Editorial Links are those that are given to you naturally by other websites that want to connect themselves to your content or company. No specific action by the SEO is required for the acquisition of these links other than creating a page with good material, so that other sites automatically want to link to you.
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Outreach Link Building is done when the SEO reaches out to bloggers or webmasters to link themselves to your website. This is an effort done to achieve a higher SEO ranking. It includes some incentives for the target webmasters in order to convince them that linking themselves to you is in their best interests.
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Non-Editorial Links are a type of spam that search engines now penalize websites for. These are the links that are created by the users in the form of comments, user profiles, guest book signings etc. on the web pages. These are links formed by the website for itself, through the user without the user’s knowledge.
How to Build Links:
To get external sites to link to you, you need to work a little. Some strategies that are used commonly to achieve this are;
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Content that is compelling enough to make people want to link to it and refer to.
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Submissions of your content and news to directories and press releases etc.
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Mentions and Reviews from influential webmasters and bloggers.
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Links from partners and friends
General Types of Links:
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Reciprocal Links are those in which both parties link themselves to each other in order to generate mutual traffic. This type of link building is no longer supported or ranked by search engines.
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Directory Link Building is done by submitting your website to directories that keep these links in the form of categorized lists. Some directories are free while others may charge you for accepting your link.
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Blog Comments, as mentioned earlier are a type of non-editorial link building. Commenting on a blog leaves a link, which is a functioning link in case of a well thought-out site, but is usually a no-follow link, and therefore has no importance in the eyes of the search engine.
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Social Bookmarks are saved web pages, on the web, in a public location. As these are stored publicly, they have a good amount of SEO value.
There are two main issues in this whole process; first, it is a very slow procedure which requires good copywriters, and a lot of work in order to make others link to you. And second; you rely on forces that you don’t control, and you are unable to control the quality or type of page that might get linked to yours.
Link Building is an important element in any web design, as they are basically the most preferred way of getting an SEO ranking, because modern search engines rank websites on the quantity and quality of these links.
References:
Paying for links, whether they pass PageRank or not, is something that Google has frowned upon for some time. It is not good practice, and it is often harmful to the websites that attempt to use it as a form of SEO. However, there are some legitimate ways to be able to pay for links that can boost up your ranking instead of kicking you to the back of the pack.
Dangerous Links
One of the most important things to watch out for when buying links is those links that would be deemed dangerous. So, how does one tell if a link is dangerous? There are a few things you should be able to see as ‘red flags’. Here are a few ways a link can show up as dangerous when it is clicked on:
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The link comes from a paid directory or an article directory that falls under a ‘spam’ category
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The link has nothing to do with the subject of the website it supposedly comes from
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The link takes readers to a forum instead of to a site that has any real informative content that could benefit them
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The link is sponsored, meaning that someone is paying for it and/or getting paid when you click on it
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The link comes as a spam content response to something already on your website
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The link requires you to allow it to be followed if it appears on your site—Google itself has recommended, strongly, that websites set links like this as ‘no-follow’ in order to avoid it being counted against the site as a whole
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The link goes back to a press release that really does not have any useful or new information to provide to the people who click on it—again, Google recommends that if you are unsure, you set it as ‘no-follow’
Information That’s Not Informative
People who are looking to buy links are not always discriminating about the links they get. If you want your site to be seen as informative in the eyes of the search engines, you need to make sure that you are actually linking to regular information that will provide some benefit to your readers. When a web crawler looks over your site, including at the links you are using, if you are not providing useful information, your rank is very likely to go down.
Linking for Affiliate Purposes
Linking back to products or reviews to try and boost affiliate marketing is also something you’re going to want to avoid. While this does make some people money, it is not good practice when it comes to building up links. You want to make sure you are providing substance to your readers, not trying to take from them.
While buying links is not technically ‘illegal’, it can cause harm to your website. It can also harm your bottom line if your links do not lead to where people are wanting to be sent, causing distrust from your visitors in your products or services. Taking the time to build up your links the natural and ethical way is what is going to boost your website the most, and it’s worth the time it takes when all is said and done.
SOURCES:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2081998/Paying-for-Search-Rankings-Is-Everyone-Doing-It
http://www.quicksprout.com/university/how-to-identify-a-dangerous-link/