Posted by sam on April 20th, 2010
Posted in Link Building Overview |
The first step to launching a successful link building campaign is to understand the elements involved in getting that much-coveted boost in page rankings. While the terms search engine optimization (SEO), link building, link popularity, and page rankings seem commonplace nowadays, only a few people appreciate how the link building process actually works. Whether conducting a link building campaign on your own or hiring a link building service or link building company to do it for you, it is important to understand the link building fundamentals.
What is Link Building? Links are essential in getting noticed on the Web. In terms of search engine ranking and indexability, they are an important factor, along with the way a search engine ranks how a user experiences and views your site. Link building is defined as an “integration of useful elements into a whole Web site to allow for the accretion of links through natural means.” From this definition, we understand that link building is a two-step process. We split this definition into two parts and analyze each to dissect the link building process better.
The Two Elements in Link Building
- The first process in link building is integration. Integration involves the combination of two or more parts or elements together into a complete whole, set, or unit. The idea in link building is to make a site desirable to the widest possible audience and admirers. In order to do so, a site must possess components that would attract viewers and potential site owners who might want to link to it. Hence, a link building campaign is not a stand-alone process that relies on a singular point of view to achieve link popularity. Without incorporating or blending other topics or materials to address its diverse audience, aiming for higher page rankings becomes a difficult goal to achieve. Full integration occurs when a site addresses the interests of all of its potential audience. This could include customers, employees, business owners, industry executives, and competitors. Any Web site that you create must take the needs and requirements of each of these groups into consideration or else you stand to isolate a valuable segment of your audience. Because you are dealing with and competing among millions of sites for traffic, every segment is indispensable. Adopting a populist attitude toward Web site creation generates relevance and meaning to the widest number of users. The more complete the integration, the greater the likelihood of attracting more links to your site.
- The second process is accretion. Accretion is the increase or growth in size through gradual addition, inclusion or fusion. Accretion cannot occur without integration. Web sites that lack the integration requirement undertake several methods in order to attract links and achieve higher page rankings. Generally, there are two manifestations of accretion: viral awareness and standard public relations. When audiences find your Web site meaningful and relevant, they unavoidably pass the word along to their friends and people they know. The campaign then becomes viral as it is viewed, linked to and shared among a large and diverse audience, which in turn results to higher link popularity. The most common mechanisms are “send a friend” emails and icons to recommend the site such as Digg, Twitter, Reddit, or StumbleUpon. The importance of viral awareness in link building makes these mechanisms a necessity. Doing without these elements would spell disaster for the accretion component in your campaign. The other form of accretion is an active one. Standard public relations needed for accretion require that you create awareness of your site by asking other site owners that they link to it. This is why integration becomes important: the more relevant your site is to a diverse audience, the greater the number of relevant sites you can request to link to yours.
The Importance of “Natural Means” In understanding the link building process, it is important to distinguish the natural from the artificial means of acquiring links. The ideal link building strategy is thus: create content that is genuinely relevant, and the links will come naturally. Natural links are considered the best links for search engine rankings, and are defined as links from other sites that are given by a website’s authors and not by bots or a computer program. Simply put, natural links are those given by the site’s owner to your website or blog because it is truly linkable, and not merely because of compensation.
There are three popular SEO techniques that are used by a link building service or a link building company to acquire more links:
- link buying
- link exchange
- link farming
Natural links become an important issue in link building because search engines like Google now give penalties to links that manipulate search engine result rankings. Search engines’ algorithms are now capable of detecting whether a site is abusing SEO techniques in order to obtain higher page rankings. However, SEO has developed ways in order to use these three techniques without getting penalties by creating natural-profiled links. Still, SEO experts are unanimous in saying that the best link building campaign involves the creation of relevant and authority content. Link building may be a long and time-consuming process, but its rewards could mean a big boost for your business. Before engaging in a link building campaign, keep these fundamentals in mind and learn more about SEO for proper guidance in making SEO-related decisions.
Tags: indexability, link popularity, page rank, Paid Link Building, ranking, search engine, SEO - Search Engine Optimization, serp
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