Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. There, now that we’ve got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let’s move on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them. Being a beginners guide this won’t be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path. Understanding what you’re trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the “why” of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.

Why Are Links Important?

To put it simply: a link is a vote. Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site. So it must be about getting tons of links and you’re done right? Wrong. This is incorrect as …

Not All Votes Are Created Equal

Unlike your own vote in an election, some votes are worth more than others and some votes are worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than yours (unless of course you’re a content writer for the Google.com domain in which case you obviously have the top vote). The basic factors that affect a link’s value to your website are:

the site strength – the strength of the website that is pointing to yours is a significant (and historically abused) factor in the valuation of links. In the absence of other easily-visible criteria let’s look at PageRank as a key valuation of a site’s strength. If a site with a PageRank 8 links to your site, this vote is worth significantly more than a link from your PageRank 3 site. This is because a PageRank 8 site is, in Google’s eyes, a more important site than the PageRank 3 site.

Relevance – the relevance of a site linking to you is, if anything, more important than a site’s strength. If you run a bed a breakfast in Utah a link from a PageRank 3 bed and breakfast will be worth more than a link from a PageRank 5 web design site. This area is a bit grey in that it relies on the engine’s ability to determine what is relevant and what exactly is not however we’ve seen evidence that this area is strong at this stage in the game and is only becoming more important over time.

Anchor text – the actual text used to link for a site is extremely important. I’ve seen extremely strong sites get beaten out by weak ones simply due to the poor use of anchor test. If you’re building links to your site be sure to include your keywords in the text that links back and, if possible, the exact phrase you are trying to rank for. At the same time, you can’t make all your anchor text exactly the same – how can that possibly look natural?

Position – the position of a link on a page and the number of other links on that page impacts the value of a link. A link in the footer of a page is given less weight than a link near the top, a link in the content of a page is given more weight than a link in a list of links and a link on a page with 50 other links is given less weight than a link on a page with only a few other links. If we think about it – this makes sense. All of these things indicate whether the site with the outbound links actually intends for one of the visitors to click the link or not. From an engine’s perspective – the more apparently a site wants a link to be clicked on, the higher the weight that link (or vote) is given.

Admittedly there are a variety of other factors but this is a beginners guide. Following the considerations above will insure that as you make each link decision – you’re odds of making the right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore them. Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned but it will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less valuable links and thus need to create far more than following he right methods.

So far we’ve covered briefly the why of link building, now let’s get into the real-life, here’s-how-to-do-it side of things. Below I’m going to cover three of my favorite link building tactics. These are tactics that apply to virtually every scenario. The number of ways to create links is only limited by your imagination however and this should not be viewed as a comprehensive list. This is, after all, a beginners guide and I’m trying to list the tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.

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