Link Building for Rookies

We’ve all heard about the importance of creating quality inbound and outbound links, but how exactly do you do that? First, how do you differentiate rich from poor links, and are there any best-practices you can follow? This post is part of the Internet Marketing for Rookies series, a thread of blog posts to help small businesses success online.

Why Is Link Building So Important?

Search engines crawl the Internet for new websites 24/7, by finding websites through other websites, and checking all the outbound links one website provides. They move as a spider on its web – hence, the terminology “web” for Internet. Link building strategies are much like networking: the more people you know, the better chances you have of landing a sale. Search engines assess how many links connect your website with others. If you have a high number of connections, the search engine perceives your website as important and, when a user runs a search with your keywords, your website will show up in a better (i.e., higher) position in the organic search results page (for more information on keywords, please see our post Keywords: The Holy Grail Of SEO).
But not all links are good. You need to differentiate quality from poor links.

Link Quality: Stay Away From Bad Apples

Using the example above, when you’re working to expand your network, you focus on developing high-quality contacts, who might provide you a good reference or even close a sale in the near future. Link building strategies are much the same: a good neighbourhood provides your website with a higher PageRank.
According to Google Guide, PageRank is “Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.” Using Google’s own words, “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.” PageRank uses a scale of 1-10.

In summary, it’s not enough to have a high volume of links to and from your website: you need quality links. Search engines define quality links as a link to a website that not only provides content that is similar or relevant to your website and your online users, but is also linked to other websites with relevant content.

How Can I Get Started?

Small businesses can get a good head-start using five successful link-building practices:

- Internal link-building
Check the internal links on your website. Is each page linked to the following page? For instance, link your home page to your products or services page by adding a line similar to “Learn about our green marketing services”, where “green marketing services” is the link to your services page.

- Directory submissions
Submitting your website to relevant directories is a must in search engine optimization. Usually, you only need your URL, website name and keywords. There are also many quality directories that accept free submissions. We compiled a small list of green directories on a previous blog post to help you get started on this task. Check it out: 12 Green Directories for North American Businesses

- Forums
Don’t underestimate the power of participating in online forums. Just be sure you’re actually contributing to the discussion (and not bluntly promoting yourself) and check if it’s a common practice to add a link to your website at the end of your post.

- Video submissions
You can apply the same rationale here. Upload interesting, viral videos and be sure to add your website to your signature.

- Articles
Many professionals are already writing articles on their area of expertise. Leverage these articles by using directory submission. You’d be surprised on how this small step can help your website presence. And, better yet, you’ll be positioning yourself as an expert!

- Blog
Blogs provide you a freeway to link building. It’s a best practice to link a blog post to relevant, external content, and bloggers will be interested in what you’re writing (assuming you’re providing quality content) and will link back to your blog. Just don’t forget to link your blog to your website.

Stay tuned for more SEO tips. Next post: link building strategies.