Link Building – A Beginner’s Guide

The aim of our beginner’s guide to link building is to provide an introduction into this key area of search engine optimisation as well as practical advice on how to go about it and what mistakes you must avoid.

What is link building?

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your own. You don’t want just any old links though, the more relevant and trusted these other websites are the more effective their link to your site will be in terms of SEO.

Link building is something you can easily do yourself or if you don’t have the time you can outsource it to an agency.

Why is link building important?

Link building is important when it comes to building trust and the more the search engines trust your website, the better it will perform in the search engine results pages. It matters because your competitors may be constantly link building and leaving you behind in the search engine results for the phrases you want to target.

How can I generate links to my site?

While it’s easy to generate outbound links (links from your site to other relevant sites) many people find it difficult to work on getting incoming links.

There are a number of ways to generate incoming links which can have traffic and SEO benefits including free online directories, press releases, social media, social bookmarking and article marketing.

Where possible you should try to get anchor text links (a link using your chosen keyword or phrase rather than just your web address or “click here”).

The search engines judge you by the company you keep so you should try to get links from reputable websites that are well established and trusted.

Common link building mistakes

Following on from the last point above, you should avoid having inbound links from ‘link farms’ or dodgy websites that do more harm to your search engine reputation than good.

Beware of companies that offer to sell you a huge number of links for a fixed fee as these will usually be from bad linking neighbourhoods and you’ll be out of pocket and tarred with the same brush.

Another common mistake is not to think about relevance. For example, if you run a plumbing business in London, having an incoming link from a perfume shop in Aberdeen is of no relevance to what you do and will be treated as such by the search engine robots.

Discover more by reading our top 10 link building tips now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Guides for Beginners, Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.