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Webbed Feet UK, web developers in Salisbury, Wiltshire

Search engine optimisation: Link building

Link building is paramount to the success of your website. Of course good content, code, and a well optimized page play a big role in how successful your website will be, but without traffic brought in from building links; your site will be unlikely to succeed. What is ‘link building?’ It is the process of creating inbound links to your webpage. You can build the links in many ways e.g. Article submissions, newsletters, directories, forum marketing, reciprocal links. The amount of ways to develop link backs are only limited to your imagination. “What is a reciprocal link?” Also known as ‘link exchanging’ a reciprocal link is when two websites link back to each other. “What are the advantages of link building?” Well, there are many advantages to link building (see following):

Advantages of Link Building

• Link popularity increases your page ranking
• The more high quality links you build, the faster you’ll creep up the search engine rankings
• Links from sites related to yours can generate you valuable traffic from your targeted market
• They can help with your site getting indexed in the search engines
• High quality inbound links make your site more valuable in its respective neighbourhood

Non-Reciprocal Links

Also known as one-way links, non-reciprocal links are of greater value than reciprocal. Some search engines dislike link selling or give exchanged links less rate, meaning they could penalise your site for having reciprocal links. When building links it is best practice to try and stick to sites relevant to yours, or of similar topic. There are a number of ways to build non-reciprocal links:

Building Non-Reciprocal Links

• Website Directories (e.g. Yahoo Directory, DMOZ)
• Links from other websites (including other domains you might own)
• Article Submissions – Creating articles for other sites
• Press Releases
• Content Syndication
• Posting articles on forums
• Using social bookmarking sites

Link Value

Not all links are of equal value. When building links you’d ideally pick a relevant website, surround your link with keywords, use keyword filled anchor text (hyper-linked text), and pick a webpage that doesn’t tell search engines to ignore links on the page (a no-follow link) and doesn’t have many outbound links, as it dilutes the quality of your link. There are websites which will use no-follow (a tag to stop search engine bots following your links), these links may help a little, though do not spend much time trying to get a no-follow link. It’s better to have a PR4 link from a related site with relevant content than a PR7 from a site with absolutely no relevance to your own website.

Deep Linking

Often when going about their daily link building, web marketers alike will only be building links to their homepage. Link backs to individual pages on your site are called ‘Deep Links’. A good method for deep linking is to use social bookmarking sites to bookmark all of your website pages, using keywords in the title and making available to public.

Internal Link Structure

Internal link building is frequently underused on many websites, but nonetheless; highly valuable. By interlinking the pages on your website you will be helping the individual pages on your website gain a greater page rank, and sharing the link juice makes your content pages more important to search engines as well as making your site easier to use. The three best practices for internal link build are:

• Site Navigation – Site navigation is a basic part of every website. The main purpose of which is to link to the most important pages on your site, and often a sub-navigation menu is used for informative pages. Be sure that you select the most important pages on your website and link to them using the navigation menu.
• In-Context - An in-context link is one which is placed within the written content on your site. Search engines favour and give more value to in-context links as opposed to link lists (pages, sidebars etc.) That applies to internal and off-site links.
• Anchor Text – Having relevant anchor text is important as it gives search engines an idea of what your link is pointing to. Without using relevant anchor text when using an internal link, you will not get the full benefit of the link.

At Webbed Feet UK Ltd, web design Salisbury, we offer an Search Engine Optimisation in Wiltshire with link building inclusive. Alternatively we do offer tuition at an hourly rate.

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Search Engines