Link Building 101 - The Basics and Beyond

Link building 101 is the first stage of the link building. The general concept is fairly simple. If you want your website or blog, or whatever web content you have, to be ranked will with the search engines, you need to get some incoming links to it. Search engines like the incoming links because they are one way to prove that your site is worth visiting. So, really, everyone is interested in building links to their web content. Here are some basics -- link building 101 -- that you should keep in mind.

There are many ways to get links into your website. One method is called "reciprocal linking", a sort of I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine strategy, where you actually ask other webmasters to link to your site and in return, you can link to theirs. This will help a little bit, but the search engines actually prefer that you have one-way links to your site. So, you can actually just contact webmasters and see if they find your site worthy of linking to. This means, you do need genuinely good content, something that other sites would consider recommending to their visitors in order to provide them with more value.

An easier, and presently more popular, way of getting backlinks to your site is to post comments on blogs, forums, and social media sites. In your answer, or in your signature, you will have the link to your web content. Again, the key here is to offer genuinely helpful answers and/or to ask relevant questions. You will not get many clicks on your link from anyone if you simply do promotional types of posts or comments. Its also a good idea to fill out your profile on all the blogs, forums, and social media sites that you participate in. This helps establish credibility and trust. Include a photo if possible. You can do the searches for relevant sites to post on in any search engine or even with certain tools. Try to find those that are ranked well in the search engines so that the links pointing back to your site will be high quality as well.

Another way to build links is to submit your site to directories and search engines. This too is time consuming, but simple. Make sure you create a description of the site you want to submit that is non-promotional and does not include the name of your site within the text. First submit your site to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing: then to the minor search engines such as About and Alexa (there are many more), and then to the search engines and directories that are relevant to your particular niche.

Remember that link-building is an on-going process that you or someone that you hire or work with will have to do throughout the life of your web content. Hopefully this link building 101 article has started you on the right foot.