The Blog on Branding

Ins and Outs of Link Building

Unless you clicked on this article by accident, you’re probably looking for the answer to at least one of these questions:

• What is link building?
• How can link building help you and your website?
• What types of links exist?/How are they acquired?

What is link building?

Link building is the process of establishing internal and external links to a website. It’s an integral part of search engine optimization because links can attract users to different websites.
Link building is all about increasing the number of high quality, relevant links to a website in order to raise its visibility in search engine results.

How can link building help you and your website?

“Building confidence, one link at a time!”




A link to your website shows that someone has confidence in your content. Passing on a visitor/ recommending your content suggests that you are following the same topic, which indicates a community. Link building is crucial for obtaining high ranking pages on keywords. A search engine recognizes a websites popularity by its links. This recognition will boost your rank, increase your exposure, and ultimately improve your sales.

Now the most critical portion:

What types of links exist?/How are they acquired?

These questions are paired because they aren’t mutually exclusive.

“Sorry gamers, we’re not including this link…”

There’s 2 major groups of links:

1. Editorial Links

These are links obtained without paying, asking or trading to be linked to. These are links which a website draws organically, because that site produces good content and markets that content with social media sites.

If people link to you, intending to cite your original content, then those links are more trusted:

“Website gets on Social Media Site > Blogger sees story > Blogger likes story > Blogger writes about site > Blogger links to site.”

2. Acquired Links

These are acquired by the site owner via payment or distribution.

They can include:

• Paid linking
• Reciprocal linking
• Article distribution
• Directory links and comments on forums, blogs and other interactive forms of social media

Search engines are less inclined to value these rankings as highly because they are self-promotional.

Just as the types of links vary, the views on each type vary. Some types are more valued than others. Google tends to look down on paying for links. Some people feel it’s an equally fruitful method. But everyone agrees that acquired links (such as paid and reciprocal links) need to be augmented.

Link building strategies need to be diverse, utilizing different options for optimizing your results and guaranteeing safe linking strategies.

“Practicing safe linking strategies is essential.”

There are many differing opinions about what works, what doesn’t and which methods are more valuable than others.

Like any good project, you must do research before you even begin to work. Design and develop your link building plan before you implement it; this generates better results for your campaign.

“You do want a successful campaign, right?”




One recommended strategy is to craft your campaign based on your competitors:

• Get the pagerank info of your website and your competitors; this way, you can set appropriate targets for yourself.
• Know your competitors’ actual link building strategies, rather than just their pagerank. It won’t hurt to emulate some of your competitors’ methods.
• Do they utilize blogs? News sites? Social Media?
• Implement your own ideas, too. Diversifying strategies is a good strategy in and of itself.

People need a reason to link to you. The best way to achieve that is by writing great content. This can be anything from an article, to an online tool, to a funny video. People need to have confidence in your content before they pass it on to others. They will have confidence if your site is informative and entertaining – having the user enjoy his time on your site is crucial. This helps to develop a good relationship with new and long-time customers, which can spur customer referrals and eventually help to build a larger community.

A community’s important because it’s a signpost of quality. Quality revolves around the relevance of the linking site. A topically relevant link indicates it’s from a community.

“The importance of quality over quantity…”

There are other ways to engage customers and supplement a community, like getting them to write reviews on their site. This can come in handy with smaller, local businesses trying to build links with local search terms. This can help your website and theirs gain exposure through newspapers, blogs, popular sites and events.

Link building usually takes center stage during SEO and SEM discussions, and rightly so. Link building is a complex and vital pillar of SEO and SEM and can make or break your business.