Link Building For Beginners

John Tremblay asked:


Link building is the process of adding links between two or more web sites. A link is somewhat like a short cut through the millions of web pages. Links are presumed to indicate which sites visit other sites for information gathering or receiving.

Link building is done primarily for one of two reasons. Either the link building is done in order to build traffic to your web site, or it is done for the purpose of search engine optimization.

Building traffic to your web site is primarily for the purpose of Pay per Click programs and these links are often different from those which are for the purpose of search engine optimization. There are even a few links which are able to build traffic AND improve search engine rankings.

When you are building links for search engine optimization, you will not necessarily get more traffic. The converse is true as well. Just because a link provides good traffic, doesn’t mean that it is good for search engine optimization.

Some web sites and forums have been set up for the primary purpose of building Pay-per-Click revenue, but because these sites are known for this purpose, they do not increase the page ranking in the search engine optimization aspect of link building. The algorithms used by the search engines do not consider such traffic building sites in any appreciable sense when developing page rankings.

Some search engines, more specifically, Google, use the link building feature of the web site as a primary part of the page ranking algorithm. The Google search engine wants to see web pages with a good number of quality incoming links and only a few outgoing links. This would indicate that the information on the specific web page is recognized as being the definitive information on the particular subject or category of information.

Some of the early search engine optimization efforts used link farms, in which thousands of web page links were bought and sold through the medium of ‘link farms’. Of course, this was not hard to detect and eliminate by the search engine indexing process. Links from known link farms were simply eliminated from consideration in the page ranking algorithms.

As some web page owners found to their dismay, the continued use of such link farm links to a web page could result in a lower ranking than would otherwise have occurred, or even to complete removal of the affected web page from the rankings completely. This tactic when used by those claiming to perform search engine optimization has led to law suits and while not technically a black hat method for search engine optimization, definitely has detrimental effects.

It can take a web page owner weeks or even months of begging, explanations, negotiations and promises to get back in the good graces of the search engine spiders after an experience such as this.

Entire books have been written on ways to use link building correctly to improve your web page standings, but it not that difficult as a web page owner to review carefully the type of presence which is desired on the internet and make sure any links foster the desired view.