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

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. link buying
2. link exchange
3. 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.

The link building process involves two steps: integration and accretion. Integration requires the consolidation of relevant elements into a whole Web site, while accretion is the use of several methods in order to increase links to your site and boost page rankings. The end result of any link building campaign is increased link popularity and better search engine rankings.

• Link Popularity

To understand the relevance of link building, it is crucial that we understand exactly what search engines are looking for in a site and what factors influence a site’s page ranking and link popularity. The theory of link popularity assumes that if search engines view other sites linking to yours, your site must be a winner and consequently, deserves an upperhand in rankings. After all, people are more likely to link to sites they find interesting or relevant. It is a common misconception that the Google Page Rank is equivalent to link popularity. In reality, Google PR is merely a subset of link popularity.

PR focuses on the quantitative side while link popularity emphasizes on the qualitative factors. Building link popularity is considered one of the most tedious tasks in SEO. Unlike before, search engines now have quality control mechanisms in place that boot out “artificially created” or useless links so that today, strategies that result to artificial links can earn penalties or point negations in a web site’s rankings. Search engines today require links that come from authoritative sites or sites that focus on the same areas as your web site. Major search engines consider link popularity in their ranking algorithms to measure a site’s importance.

There are two types of links that give a boost to link popularity:

1. Links from other sites using like keyword phrases as your site
2. Links from relevant categories from industry-specific portals and major directories

Experts warn about paying for submission on free-for-all, or FFA, sites that are not viewed as quality links by major search engines. Moreover, getting links from sites that are completely outside the range or field of interest of your Web site will not earn you high points on the rankings.

• Link Acquisition Strategies When launching a link building campaign independently or when you are using a link building service or hiring a link building company, you have to take note that while many strategies exist that could help you acquire links, abusing these strategies will downgrade your search engine rankings.

Among the top SEO techniques that have been prone to abuse or manipulation include:

1. Link Buying. Many bloggers and webmasters buy links in order to boost their page rankings. It is also the easiest way to build link popularity. Link buys are frowned upon by major search engines like Google and SEO experts advise against link buys. However, some have found ways to buy links without getting into the search engine’s radar and others find link buying useful in launching viral, social media campaigns that have a specific end date.
2. Link exchange. A link exchange is a network of websites operating as a web ring by registering under a central organization running the exchange and in turn, receiving an HTML code to be inserted into their web pages. This HTML code runs a display of banner advertisements on member web sites. Link exchanges, or reciprocal linking, are the most common link acquisition approach for bloggers and webmasters.
3. Link Farming. Link farms are made up of a bogus network of blogs, and from that fake network, they create links to their web site. Though an effective link popularity builder in the past, stricter quality control mechanisms of search engines have prompted an avoidance of this strategy.

Effective methods in getting links include link baiting, directory submissions, comments, article submissions, and writing testimonials or reviews. There are several specialized SEOs and link building service that are capable of helping you perform some of the above-mentioned strategies.

• Ideal Link Profile There are ideal ways to ensure that your web site is rated positively by the search engines. Among the important things to consider are:

1. One link per linking domain. Try getting one or two links from a website that wants to link to yours.
2. Fewer Reciprocal Links. Reciprocal links are easily detectable and subject to point negations. It is best to keep reciprocal links below 5% of your site’s total linkage.
3. Varied Anchor Text. Vary keywords in the anchor text to avoid red flags from search engines.
4. Related Links. Acquire links from web sites that share relevant content to get better page rankings.

• What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or URL. They are often used interchangeably with inbound links, incoming links, inward links, and inlinks. In the world of SEO, backlinks, like PageRank, are an indicator of link popularity or importance of a particular web page. The weight that search engines like Google ascribe to quality backlinks when calculating SERP have made backlinks a building block for excellent SEO. Search engines consider pages with a substantial number of quality backlinks more relevant or more important than others when coming up with SERP. Link building is a vital tool that gives Internet businesses direct traffic, better position in the search engine rankings, and more profits. For any link building campaign to prevail and reap these benefits, webmasters or site owners need not rely on merely the quantity of backlinks pointing to their site, but the quality of backlinks as well. The usage of proper search engine optimization techniques and link building methods should take these facts into consideration.

• Quality Matters.

In getting inbound links for link popularity, quality matters. Search engines like Google compute the relevancy of a site based on the importance or relevancy of the backlinks pointing to that site. It is not enough to get as many inbound links as possible; we need to look at the quality of these backlinks. Quality is usually determined by the content of a specific site. When backlinks to your site come from other sites that have related content to your site, these backlinks are judged as relevant by the search engines. However, if these backlinks are from sites with unrelated content, search engines consider them less relevant. The more relevant the backlinks are to your site, the greater their quality. Moreover, there are several factors that influence a backlink’s value. When backlinks come from “high authority” sites, they are highly valuable.

• Importance of Anchor Text

One thing you need to consider in back link building is the anchor text of your backlinks. An anchor text is a description of the inbound link and must contain useful information relevant to the content on the linked page. There are tools like search engine bots that evaluates the relevancy of an anchor text to the content of a given web site. The bottom line is for the anchor text and content to be highly congruent. This will ensure that your web page becomes highly weighted in the SERP rankings based on a given keyword query.

• PageRank and Backlinks

Backlinks are important when we deal with how to increase our performance in Google PageRank. SEOWatch conducted a study to determine exactly how important backlinks are when computing PageRank. They conclude that 67% of PageRank depends on backlinks. This tells us that serious link building efforts require a lot of investment in order to enhance the quantity as well as quality of backlinks to a website. There are several techniques in building backlinks – some are considered ethical, and some unethical.

• Get Them Naturally.

When we say ethical methods in link building, we mean that the link acquisitions are made naturally. Increasing awareness on how search engines operate has resulted to the increasing use of sneaky and manipulative designs by webmasters in order to influence their placements in the search engine rankings. Since search engine algorithms are designed to assign rankings in a democratic manner, tougher measures and quality requirements have been imposed to prevent other webmasters from using unethical methods to gain undue advantage over others. Using sneaky devices like link farms do not only get you penalized, they might get you banned entirely. Search engines look for natural inbound links, which are links that are built slowly over time. There are several techniques to build natural links. Link baiting and using high quality content in order to attract natural links your way are among the most effective ways to improve a site’s link popularity. Site owners can develop natural links by themselves or can hire a link building company to do it for them.

• Backlink Building Don’ts

There are several link building practices to avoid.

1. Link exchange. One of the don’ts in link building is link exchange. This operates as a barter exchange of links. If you put a link to their site, they put a backlink to your site. When involved in link exchanges, you must be wary of the ratio of your outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links outnumber your inbound links, this is a negative sign. Moreover, you must ensure that your link exchange partners are not link farms; if so, you may put your site at risk of being banned from search engines.
2. Suspicious links. Never link to suspicious sites. While search engines do not penalize you for having backlinks from such sites, engaging in a link exchange program with so-called “bad neighborhood” sites would destroy your link building efforts.
3. Acquiring quality backlinks are an important factor to consider in any link building campaign geared at improving search engine rankings and enhancing link popularity. However, it takes more than just backlinks to drive traffic to your site and influence your rankings. The most important thing is to develop a website with high quality content that is useful and relevant to the end user experience.

Here are a few things to look for:

1. Be sure to always check the fine print, especially in terms of ownership and distribution agreements. Payment may involve different methods – debit card, credit card, Paypal, digital check or any number of options made available online. Review their policy on refunds as well as those related to violations of the submission policy.
2. Before turning it over, it helps to double check any links in the article first to check if they work. Once the article is in the preferred document version, it is then submitted to the PR website either through the uploading section or through email.
3. For paid PR packages, the content often needs to be reviewed and evaluated according to the host site’s restrictions. This ensures that your article meets a standard of quality being used with other articles on that site as well – giving the site a credible reputation that you can also benefit from.
4. Select the category that is most appropriate and advantageous for your material – making sure that the people looking for an article on your subject matter will find it.

The process involved in submitting your article as part of a link building service tells the client a lot about the quality of the service itself. After all, what takes a longer time to work on is the relationship between the website and the link building company.

Competition is there whether one acknowledges them or not. With the importance of link popularity today, tools in checking links have also grown in popularity. In the market, companies like INP & Arelis Google Keyword Tool, WordTracker, SEO Tools Rank Checker and Free-Webmaster-tools provide checking and link building service for websites that may need their link’s popularity checked. Most of these companies charge a fee for their services, while there are still many others that offer services for free catered to those start-ups and cash-strapped companies. Search Engine marketing is a very tricky endeavor, but once mastered, the benefits are tremendous and very advantageous. Many shortcuts exist; there are also techniques that businesses can do to take advantage of SEO opportunities.

What worked for one company may not work as well for another. Individual strategies are important for companies to be able to reach out to the millions of users who log into the World Wide Web everyday. Beyond the technicalities and skills that are required in establishing a website, every business has their own goals with which individual strategies are applied. Checking the quality of links, inbound and outbound, is important to rank high in search engine tools like Google and Yahoo. Google, for example, values quality inbound links found in the website for higher rankings. The more quality inbound links a web site has, the more probable it is for that company to be ranked high in Google searches or any other SEOs for that matter.

To check and make sure of the legitimacy of a website’s popularity, companies can utilize these tips:

1. Not faking and/or using artificial methods in creating inbound links to one’s website. In other words, link farms, top sites, automatic link generators, link services, spamming with keyword text, and doorway pages will most probably be an unwise use of funds to raise search engine rankings. If worse comes to worst, a website may be banned by search engine marketers as a result of implementing these methods.
2. The main objective of link building is to rank high in the list of search engine marketers. Link swaps and linking with similar websites are still the best way to go.
3. Check your links and spend time logging on to search engine websites like Google and Yahoo. Typing in keywords related to your website and poring through how your site is presented every time you make a search is another good way of checking your website’s popularity.

Sheer quantity of links is not the name of the game. To be popular in the vast domain of the Internet, quality is all that matters. A couple dozen links to a website from related, high quality, authority sites are much more valuable to a search engine than hundreds of low quality links one can obtain by exchanging with any site that would agree to post their pages. Positioning one’s website to reach out to millions of customers can only be done through patient strategizing and building link influence. Link Building has played a vital role in search engine positioning for many companies. It helps improve a company’s rankings on different search engines and most importantly, boost over-all company productivity and popularity.

How does one go about optimizing their twitter accounts for link building?

1. Bit.ly links. Users – more importantly, experts in extremely specialized fields and professions- can easily relay to their followers a shortened link to an article of interest (why not yours?). Make sure these links are working and that they lead directly to the promised article, which expounds on the tweet’s point (it will be more harmful to lead readers on a good chase).
2. Followers. For every person who has done a re-tweet, consider their number of followers. These are authority figures who are active online and have the social skills to boot. That simple engine for link building popularity has a higher conversion potential in clicks to your URL because you’ve hit the target market at the bull’s eye. Moreover, it provides what RSS feeds cannot – easy interaction.
3. Hashtags. A link building company using hashtags also helps in creating a room for discussion while making it easier to spot in searches. Imagine the numbers drummed up by being a trending topic if only for a short period of time!
4. Username. Selecting the most frequently searched name for your brand or company as the Twitter account name would be a good way to start. Then spread the URL whenever an opportunity presents itself; the “Follow us on Twitter” button on most websites is not there by accident. Another such opportunity is using the frequently indexed “Bio” effectively – USPs, brand key words, marketing tags that point searches your way.
5. Microblog. View the 140-limit not as a restriction, but as liberation – you are free to let creativity get your point across within the average person’s attention span. The first 50 characters are particularly strategic as these “lead-ins” determine its search viability.
6. Retweet. To make use of one of its best features – re-tweeting – leave a few characters allowance for followers to comment on it. This makes the re-tweet less like a marketing campaign and more as a resource of genuine interest.

With Twitter as a link building tool – you are bound to generate a lot of interest.

SMO has another primary agenda; As the person who coined the term, Rohit Bhargava, explains, is to make the target article/website/blog “…easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines, and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.” It is, simply put, to make your material the talk of the town by enabling people to share it conveniently according to their preferences. Indeed, as a recent survey conducted, participants from 50 countries—a conclusive 90%—say that online endorsements of their friends/colleagues are something they consult with/trust (Nielsen Global Online Consumer). That figure singlehandedly points out the already obvious advantages of making linkability a marketing priority. Here are a few pointers to note:

1. Add clearly visible buttons; The easiest step would be to add clearly visible buttons to make sharing any material almost reflexive, whether on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon or any industry-specific site (i.e. Technorati). Enabling tagging and comments also make for a productive interaction with netizens.
2. Creating quality content; For those who are already applying optimal SEO practices to their own online presence, chances are they already understand the value of creating content that is not only a shout-out to search engines but is also compelling. In other words, content that is easy to read, relevant, accurately verifiable, and interesting. That makes for material people will actually want to share.
3. Community; The importance of grasping “community” can never be understated. This translates to being actively involved not just on a blatantly commercial, “I’m here to sell” approach. Participating means providing positive contributions to the group — case studies, constructive comments, guides to help make certain informed decisions, updates on matters that the community is passionate about (hobby, campaign, and if all goes well, your BRAND). Keep this in mind as community members protect their own; any spamming or obvious exploitation of their networks can lead to considerably backlash.

The success of an SMO strategy is very much like its nature — both quantitative and qualitative. Setting defined indicators of success, an individual/organization will find not only increased traffic or comments or links to their site. More importantly for some, it enables them to keep an ear quite close to the ground. A product/service’s pre-, current, and post-development can constantly be given another direct source of insight — the consumers themselves. This is but the start of something that will doubtless be a force to reckon with, no matter the industry.

What it basically does is bring the spotlight on quality websites based on the formation of a collaborative opinion with the help of its users. Its more than 8 million users can add sites they just happen to find and recommend it under one of the around 500 topics used by StumbleUpon. Also, items with the lowest/oldest ratings are regularly removed to maintain its image as the go-to place for the moment’s best of the web.

From the online marketer’s point of view, it is indeed a social discovery site. What a lot people don’t know though, is that it can reserve a certain number of daily page views for the right price. Web publishers participate in this cleverly designed ad network for a minimum $0.05/StumbleUpon user who visits.

It may be best employed for brand or campaign awareness rather than that of a sales tool. So, does being a high-traffic site translate to being an effective source of new visitors for the bookmarked sites? Well, according to several experimental studies such as the one by www.social-media-optimization.com it does, especially in comparison with the other social media sites. What is even more convincing is the observation that SU users being in “discovery mode” tend to explore the destination website rather than other sites where they leave after the landing page. This behavior leads to its potential for improvement as a direct e-commerce driver.

1. Micro-blogging. Even the already established publication, The Guardian, made the revolutionary move to be exclusively found on Twitter (after 188 years of being on print). The micro-blogging site represents some of the best things about the World Wide Web —- literally up-to-the-minute-news, social and professional networking, niche insights, and domino-effect information broadcasting. All those features — in 140 characters or less. Other micro-blogging sites include Tumblr, Plurk, and Squeelr.
2. Video Sharing. After the success of YouTube, which can only be described as phenomenal, video sharing has become an important player in SMO. In tri-media, TV advertisements cost tons of money, whereas a video uploaded on YouTube can generate impressive hits for virtually no cost comparison. An interesting video with good reviews and ratings can singlehandedly lead to swift traffic swelling to your site. To help give your videos a push, consider the channel profile, the keywords/tags used, even the very title of the video.
3. Picture Sharing. As cliché as it may sound, a picture paints a thousand words. And as a number of psychologists have employed over the years — an image can affect one’s disposition. At the forefront of this would be the Yahoo-owned Flickr, which Technorati is also affiliated with. As characteristic of the most successful social networking sites, their communities are very involved. For those involved with online marketing, the site’s link embedding capabilities, comment subscription for ease of response, affordable annual Pro membership, and good privacy options, Flickr has understandably become quite the choice.
4. Social Bookmarking. Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon, and Technorati are sites that help collect, play up, distribute content online (so as to diminish the impending threat of information overload on netizens). Article tagging, link sharing, keeping on top of the hottest items online, and browsing by user tags all define in SMO. Del.icio.us, for one, has over 4 millions who have collectively bookmarked over 100 million web pages. Amongst social bookmarking users are the sought after bloggers, for whom using some variation of “add this to ” is almost reflexive.

1. News. “Now” is the operative word when it comes to the Internet’s strength against other media. Optimizing this involves creating content that’s definitely in the know.
2. Contrary. Although not necessarily taken to mean creating arguments for its own sake. Rather, being contrary in linkbaiting is taken to mean providing another critical view, a new insight to a pre-conceived notion, or the discovery of an entirely new area of interest for that matter. Originality—whether in layout presentation, approach to the main topic, and most of all, in terms of content—can spell the difference between a well-linked piece and a missed article.
3. Resource. Being the authority on something (and having to earn that credence) is a distinguishing factor for any writer. A number of the most-read or viewed material online imparts knowledge that one can only get from the experts.
4. Humor. Ah, never underestimate the power of rapport that can be built with a laugh. Humor in linkbaiting makes it something you instinctively want to share with other people. After all, one good laugh deserves another.