Link Love – Also Known as Back Linking

Let’s talk about linking for a moment. Linking is a way for you to promote your website and it’s content. It is also considered a very effective form of online marketing, there is however a big BUT when it comes to linking. I covered I little about linking in SEO Myth 2 and said that it is very important to only link to and from relevant sites to your site. Adding your link to a site that is not in some way relevant to your site can influence your sites exposure and target audience negatively.

Let’s look at a quick example: You own a art gallery and you have a website that showcases art but also sells art online. There would no point in hammering away and submitting left and right to just any web site, a lot of research is involved. In the case of an art gallery you would submit to “traditional art” portals and sites. Submitting your site’s link to a site that only deals with digital art forms would be wrong as this is not your target audience. Adding links to other sites and mediums that point to your site will also increase you popularity with search engines. You also need to do some extensive research before submitting to just any site or directory. You have to make sure that the site you are submitting to is important, has a lot of visits and a Page rank of at least 4/10.

The most popular mediums to get links from are blogs, other relevant sites, directories like MyPE and SA-SEO and newsletters. These mediums generate the most traffic but again remember to keep it relevant to your site. If you are going to link to a directory you have to make sure that the directory depth is not too far down before the link to your site is displayed. At the end of the day you have to do extensive research and remember that relevancy is a key factor.

The most important link building related question is ‘Why?’. Before you start building links, you’ll have to ask yourself “Why would someone link to our site?”. If you have trouble answering this question, you’ll probably be better off building solid, link worthy content first.

Don’t forget your own website as a link building tool. Lots of webmasters tend to only go out and obtain new links when they start their link building campaign. Optimising your internal link structure first can lead to impressive improvements in search engine rankings.