Link Building – The Basics

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This is a guest post by Olusegun Adedokun from internet-earner.com. Should you wish to guest post in this blog, please check out the guest post guidelines.

Lye’s note: This post give a good explanation of various terms related to link building. Give this a read to understand the basics behind it.

Back links

You get back links when another blog or website links to yours. For instance, if you submit an article to an article directory, then you’ll have an incoming link – a back link from the directory to your blog.

Search engines prefer one-way back links coming in from relevant high-quality websites.

Anchor text
An anchor text is the clickable part of the link you create. This is important because it is better to use your keywords as anchor texts on incoming links. So if you’re trying to rank for “knitting secrets,” then those two words should be the anchor text for many of your back links.

Do-follow/no-follow link – What are they?

There are two types of “nofollow” attribute:

The robots Meta tag version – <Meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />.

This tells search engine bots (also called crawlers or spiders) not to follow links on a page

There is also the link attribute – <a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>.
This tells search engines not to count the link in terms of ranking pages.

Hypothetically, these links are worthless in boosting your search engine rankings. In practice, you will sometimes see some benefit, particularly when mixed in with a load of dofollow links.

Every link is automatically a “dofollow” link as long as there isn’t any rel=”nofollow” attribute. There is no rel=”dofollow” attribute.

Types of back links
Can sponsored or paid links hurt your SER (Search Engine Rank) ?

Officially, Google’s stand is that buying links is a ploy to manipulate rankings – a act Google frowns on.

In real life, though, it’s very tough for Google to penalize you for buying links because they won’t be able to tell for sure. If really there is a penalty, it then means you can destroy a competitor by simply by buying links to their site and later reporting them to Google!

Now, we know it doesn’t work that way. So, if there’s a “penalty,” it may be that Google won’t “count” links from paid sources.

NOTE: Google punishes sites that are selling back links. If you buy back links, buy from the blog/sites that are not penalized.

Reciprocal Links VS One-way Links

Reciprocal links are good especially if they come from relevant, high quality blogs/websites but one-way incoming links are more valuable as per SEO.

What is a one-way link?

One-way links are non-reciprocal links. That means that A links to B, but B does NOT link back to A.

Search engines love to see one-way links from relevant, quality sites.

What is a three-way link?

A three-way link is an exchange of links from two webmasters so that each one’s blog/website gets a one-way link instead of a reciprocal link.

For this to work, at least one of the webmasters needs to have a second blog/site in the same niche. Let me illustrate how it works:

Webmaster A links his Site 1 to Webmaster B’s Site 2. Then Webmaster B links his Site 3 to Webmaster A’s Site 1.

Thus Sites 1, 2 and 3 all have one-way incoming links, like this:

Site 1 -> Site 2 -> Site 3 -> Site 1

What is a site wide link?

Site wide links are links found on every page of a blog/website. For instance, a lot of people have a link to their “home” page (the index page) on all other pages of their blog/web site. This is a site wide link.

What is pinging?

Pinging is informing search engines or directories you’ve updated content on your web page. The aim is to get search engines and directory bots to crawl and index your new content immediately.

For instance, if you post a new article on your blog, you can use pingomatic.com or pingler.com to inform multiple bots about this change.

I hope you have gotten a better understanding of linking. Please leave a comment behind if you have anything to add on. Thanks for reading.

Olusegun Adedokun blogs at internet-earner.com where he talks about personal development and how to earn an income from the internet. He is committed in enjoying the blogging process with his readers. Be sure to visit his blog for fun, freedom and financial independence.

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