Link Building Guide

Many people correctly realize that having a lot of relevant links from high-quality authoritative sites linking to your website will give your webpage good ranking in the search engine results page.

Methods of website linking

1. External Links

The process of obtaining these valuable link is called link building. The process involves finding sites that are relevant to your topic and then finding quality sites that already have good ranking with search engines. Then comes the hard part - contacting the website owners of these prospective sites and asking them if they would link to your webpage. Many times, they will either ignore you or say no. Once in a rare while, you may get a yes. In order to increase the chance of them saying yes, some people will offer them money in order to encourage them to link to you. Others say that one should never buy links. But if you purchase link judiciously for links in prime locations, then it may be acceptable.

Prime location means a link in the middle of the main text content and not as a "list of links" in a sidebar or footer. It also mean buying a link from a site that is not in the sole business of selling links. You do not want to buy a link from a link farm. You do not want to buy a link from a location where Google can determine that the link has been bought. If Google determines that a link has been bought, it will give the link no weight or may even penalize you.

You also want to make sure that any link that you obtain is a link that does not have the "rel=nofollow" attribute in the link code. This attribute also tells the search engine to give the link no weight.

You also would ideally want the link text to be a keyword or phrase that is relevant to your page.

2. Internal Links

Understandably, it is not always possible to control how other webmasters link to you. But you do have control on how your link is from one page of your site to another page on your site.

Many website owners are so busy trying to obtain links from external sites, that they forget to interlink the pages on their own site.

Since, you have control over all the page of your site, it is easy for you to make links form one page to another page in the middle to text content. This is known as interlinking one's internal pages. And we consider this a part of the link building process.

Although you still need links from external sites to link to you, these links are difficult to obtain. In the meantime, a "SEO low-hanging fruit" is to link to one's own pages. Search engines do recognize these internal links and do give them weight - how much weight is debatable. But since these are easy links to make, just interlink your pages whenever possible.

3. Self-publish links

So you've asked others to link to you and too many of them say no. You've interlinked all your own pages as much as possible. What next?

You can create your own external content and in those content put links to your webpage. The external content can be another site that you create or another blog that you post regularly. Or you can post to a free blog platform such as Wordpress.com or Blogger.com or Tumblr.com.

Or you can write articles in self-publishing platforms such as Hubpages.com, Squidoo.com, or InfoBarrel.com. In those articles, judiciously put in links to your site. SheToldMe.com and RedGage.com might also be other places where you can insert in links to your site.

And then there are web forums that you can participate in the discussion. Most web forums allow you to have a signature link at the bottom of your post. That signature can be a link to your website.

Similarly, you can comment on other people's blogs, some of which allow your username to link back to your site.

It is debatable as to how much value links from forums and blog comments are worth in the eyes of search engines. And some forums and blog platforms automatically inject the "rel=nofollow" in those links, so it would be worth nothing. But if you enjoy participating in the forums and commenting on blogs, then why not.

In summary, focus on getting external links from other sites and interlinking your own site pages. Then you can self-publish content which you can add in links to your site.

Here are some ways described on How to Build Backlinks