Link Popularity & Link Building Strategies

[branica]

In the early days of the internet, web hyper links were more or less the only way to get visitors to a site, because search engines were in their infancy. Later link building became a topic and it has been a hot topic ever since. As search engines grew to become the major sources of web traffic, search engines started to rank sites according to the quantity and relevancy of their incoming links and content. And the power of quality links is still increasing…

Link Popularity & Building Strategies

We all know that links rule the worldwide web. Link building, which used to be a routine task of any webmaster, has grown into a full scale industry with millions of dollars in annual sales. Ranking algorithms views links as a human judgment or a person’s positive endorsement of a website. Basically, the more endorsements pointing to your website the higher page rank your site will get. This is the organic and “natural way” of acquiring links and search engines really loves sites with a lot of organic inbound links.

Since the natural way of getting links for a new website is very time consuming and can actually take forever some additional “fuel” is often required. Many strategies for link building exist, but since the ‘natural way’ often requires a lot of work many webmasters often try to find other ways to get links pointing to their websites. But Beware! Some of these strategies can actually be very tricky and do a lot more harm than you would ever think of. To avoid being labeled as a site trying to “fool” the search engines there are a few critically things to keep in mind when making a link building strategy:

Link Buying
This practice is pretty much discouraged by Google, because it undermines the idea of the proxy for human judgment and if Google find out that you are being linked from a typical “links page” you may not get credited for that link to your site. It won’t hurt you but it won’t help you either. What CAN hurt you, however, is if YOU link out to a link farm or a so called “bad neighborhood”. Then your site may very well become sandboxed by google and drop out completely from their indexing. So when you are buying links you have to be very savvy.

User Friendliness
View your site from the eyes of the user when building your links. The whole point is to make your link exchanges look like they are acquired the natural and organic way and this is very important. Do not store links in separate link pages - links must be in the body text or in a sidebar preferably among other relevant links. Make the anchor text look like a real endorsement, so don’t just stuff a bag of keywords in there. This is a CRUCIAL point many webmasters are missing!

The theory about reciprocal linking is that it does not carry as much weight as it did a couple of years ago. But it done correctly it can still help and bring additional targeted traffic.

To sum it all up:

Make your linking strategy look as natural as possible. As long as you are not linking to bad neighborhoods and fishy or un-related sites you should be fine. You do NOT get penalized for bad sited linking to you as that could be out of your control. Avoid the known patterns of link trading and think “outside” the box to avoid being penalized by the search engines. Happy link building!