When it came to this post, I didn’t know if I was saving the best or worst for last. Link building is such a fundamental aspect of SEO that it encompasses the good, the bad and the ugly.
Hence my first bit of advice for you.
If you’re looking at studying an SEO course, especially a paid one, make sure they cover link building as a topic unto itself. If not, don’t bother with it.
It really is that important. Put it this way. There are some sites that Google has real difficulty with. Some it cannot read at all. Yet there are plenty of examples sitting at the top spot in their search engine results page. Why? Because there are enough links pointing to the page.
Before we look at various link building strategies, we need to understand the basic structure of a link.
Anatomy of a Link
Not all links are created equally. Some will give you more of a search engine boost than others. The following details the structure of a “perfect” link:
<a href=”link to your page” title=”your keyword phrase”>your keyword phrase</a>
For example, if you had a page selling red tennis shoes, the links you are looking for are:
<a href=”http://myblog.com/red-tennis-shoes” title=”red tennis shoes”>red tennis shoes</a>
I’m telling you, “red tennis shoes” is an untapped niche. A veritable gold mine.
That’s not all. Links from different sites will carry a different weight, depending on the linking page’s PR. That is to say, links from pages with higher PR are worth more than those with lower PR.
And we’re still not done!
Click the advanced information button on your SEOToolbar 
Under Site Links you will see a list of entries; .edu, .ac.uk, .gov, .mil
These are domains that Google consider to be highly authoratative and as such, will place a greater weight on any links that point to your page.
One final note on links, relevancy. The more relevant a page is to your topic the more weight a link will bear. So for our red tennis shoes example, a link from a flower arranging site won’t be as good as a link from a tennis equipment site.
Basic Link Building Strategies
The following are just a few simple ways to build links to your site. At the end of the day, a link is a link, but wherever possible, concentrate on highly relevant websites on .edu, .gov, .ac.uk and .mil domains
- Comment on blogs
- Social bookmarking sites. Submit your page to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and so on. The list is almost endless. Just don’t do too many at once.
- Write an article and submit it to an article directory.
- Create web pages on web 2.0 sites. Squidoo, Hub Pages, Weebly etc. Again, there are countless to choose from. Each page needs to be unique however.
That may not look like much, but consider this. Welshscribe.co.uk has only been live since January and all I’ve done is comment on other blogs. In that time I’ve amassed over 1000 links (according to the toolbar). OK that’s pathetic, but you can see the potential right?
Link building needn’t be a lengthy process, but it is highly important. Don’t overlook it. At the very least you should be politely asking others to link to you. You do have social bookmaring buttons at the end of your blog posts right?
Conclusion
So we come to the end of the series on SEO basics. I hope you have found something useful over the last few weeks. You are now armed with all the knowledge you need in order to:
- discover profitable keywords
- research the competition around those keywords
- create a web page taking advantage of all the on-page factors
- craft and obtain the perfect links for that web page.
Feel free to ask questions about link building in the comments below. Alternatively, there will be an open Q & A on Thurday inviting questions on all aspects of SEO covered in this series.
Thank you for reading. Don’t forget to do the social bookmarking 
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I hope I am understanding this correctly. Are you saying that when we link to another person’s site, we should be careful which part we are attaching the link to? So in my following example, B is better than A?
A. Check out this week’s Writer Dad [Writer Dad underlined and linked] for a great Father’s Day poem.
B. Check out this week’s Writer Dad for a great Father’s Day poem [Father's Day poem underlined and linked.] B is better than A because more people will search for “Father’s Day poem” than for “Writer Dad?” Or am I totally off the mark? Or off the Marc?
.-= Randi´s last blog ..Ken and Pen—-You’re it! =-.
Hehe.
Yeah you’re right Randi, b) is probably the more preferred version. If in doubt, go with the title of the page. Or ask the author what link text they prefer, the Law of Reciprocity states they are more likely to return the favour
Hi Marc,
Can you explain how you discovered how many links you’ve had since January? I’ve linked to Randi, for example, but she doesn’t get pingbacks. Other folk have linked to me and I’ve only found out by chance, even though my pingback system is activated.
.-= janice´s last blog ..How to Breathe Life Into Your Writing =-.
Janice, on the SEO toolbar, first button after “PageRank”. That one gives you an estimate of how many links point to your domain.
Mine reads “1K”. I know my site has been live since January, and I know what I’ve been doing in terms of link building, hence my comment.
Pingbacks only work with posts, and even then someone needs to ‘ping’ in the first place. You won’t get a pingback when someone links to Sharingthejourney.co.uk. That button on the toolbar will show you how many of those you have.
(The button next to it shows how many links point to the page you are on.)
Don’t laugh…where is the SEO toolbar?
.-= janice´s last blog ..How to Breathe Life Into Your Writing =-.
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