Methods of Link Building
Having an active marketing method that delivers a constant stream of high quality web traffic is definately an achievable task. In order to gain traffic you need a big web presence, and to get a substantial presence first of all you have to have a good quality website that Google can easily read, and second, a back-catalogue of good quality links pointing at your site from as many other authority sites as possible.
It’s not as difficult as it may sound to achieve this, in fact, considering the amount of systems in place willing to do it all for you, it can be reasonably easy. The first concept you’ll need to understand is that not all link are equal. A good way of judging how valuable a link from a particular site will be, is by checking its Google Page Rank. This is a system whereby Google ranks pages from zero o ten based on how much it values the quality of the content on a given page. Ten being the best, zero being the worst. Sites with no Page rank (below 0) either haven’t been found by google yet, or have been blacklisted from the Google listings and should be avoided.
In a perfect world, we’d all have lots of links from the home-pages PR-10 sites, however the fact that there are only around 10 PR-10 sites that exist somewhat hinders this approach, and those 10 or so won’t usually link to many other websites because they don’t need to, have nothing to gain from it, and would never stop receiving link requests. Even slightly lower PR sites, like PR-7/8s are very picky about who they link to. These highly ranked sites are known as “authority” sites and tend not to link to lower ranked sites (not very often anyway) because they simply have nothing to gain from it.
What you’re aiming to do it to get links from as many of the highest PR websites as you possibly can, and/or from new sites with no PR yet, but that show potential to have a good PR in the future (basically sites that are building links to promote themselves). Looking out for sites like these is a good long term strategy to undertake because you never know what sites will have high PR in a few months / a year or so’s time.
How do you get links? This is the question. You can search online for sites that link to other sites, as there are many reciprocal link management sites around. The problem with these sites is that reciprocal links are being downgraded by the major search engines as they are increasingly being seen as an arrangement between two sites in order to gain a link. They have not been discounted completely however as it is natural for sites to reciprocate links for example between customer and supplier etc.
By far the most efficient way to get to the good seats in the search engine results ranking (at the top) is with one way links (getting sites to link to you without you having to link back). As people aren’t very inclined to give away links for nothing, this can be quite difficult. Some sites may just genuinely like your site’s content and give link to you as a resource for their users, but generally speaking, you will have to give them return
If you only have one website this is a problem, if you have two websites this can still be a problem if they are hosted in the same place as they will have the same IP address and so will appear to be the same site. There are several answers to this problem, but one way link management is the easiest way to go.
In effect you enter your website into a triangle arrangement whereby your website links to website B which links to website C which links back to you. This benefits each site to the sum of one non-reciprocal link, and each site gives one non-reciprocal link to a different site. The major search engines cant track your linking in this instance and so you are rewarded with a hefty shove up the rankings as a result.
