Link-Building: Simple Tips on building links
You can have the nicest looking website in the world, with fantastic on-page optimisation but if you want to get found by search engines, the vital SEO ingredient you need are backlinks from other websites. Building links to a website is hard work, taking many hours. If you don’t have stamina or dedication, I’d recommend paying a profession link builder to do the work for you. If you’ve got the time though, the process of building links is relatively easy. To get quality links though takes a bit more effort.
Links have two main purposes:-
PageRank - DoFollow links are a must
A good dofollow link can raise the PageRank of your pages and make you do better in Google searches. Really there isn’t such a thing as a DoFollow link. A DoFollow link is simply a link which doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” attribute set in it HTML href. The ideal (high-quality) link is placed on a page on the right topic, with good PR, anchor text matching the keywords you want to rank for and in the middle of a paragraph of keyword-rich text. Getting all these factors right for a link is quite hard but if you get the opportunity for such a link, take it!
Traffic - DoFollow links are a bonus
You don’t have to build links just to do well in Google searches. If a link is well-placed it can bring traffic to your site. It’s essential that the link is placed on a relevant page, e.g. a comment on a popular blog post on the same topic as your website. As long as the link has the potential to bring you traffic it doesn’t matter if it has the nofollow attribute. Who knows, maybe the link will lose the nofollow attribute in the future.
Sources of Links
You can build links posting in forums that allow dofollow signature links and submitting to directories. It’s likely that all these links wil be of very low-quality and will pass little link juice to your site but they are easy to get. If you join a forum such as DigitalPoint or SitePoint you’ll also have the opportunity to pick up SEO tips while posting.
Slightly better quality links can be made by making comments on blogs. Most blog owners moderate the comments so it’s necessary to make a good, non-spammy comment to be sure your link sticks.
You can also do a limited number of link exchanges with other websites and even just ask for a link, e.g. from a friend’s website or from your customers or suppliers.
I’ll go into more detail on the different types of link building in a later post.