Guidelines for Effective Link Building

A great way to enhance a website’s online reputation and search engine rankings is to build links for it. Starting a link building campaign will have a site well on its way to Internet stardom. However, an important consideration prior to starting one is identifying the most practical approach to building effective links. This is a sensitive area for beginners starting out their own optimization strategies.

There are a couple of ways for building links. Passive or natural link building entails no effort on the part of the individual involved, while active link building will have the same individual communicating with other website owners and administrators to request for the former’s link to be added to the latter’s pages.

Simply put, a search engine optimization effort is incomplete without an effective link building component. By using a number of basic yet productive techniques aimed at doing the task, a website’s search engine ranking and its overall popularity in the web will increase by leaps and bounds.

Link Building without the Effort

Basically, passively acquiring links depends largely on the quality of the articles and other content present in the website. These items will serve as the magnet to attract and influence other websites, so that they eventually add your own site’s links to their pages. The way this works is that good-quality content enhances the image of the website itself. Websites with good rep are the prime candidates for exchange links. Ensuring that each and every content that make their way to the website is topnotch not only preserves the site’s respectability, but also makes it attractive to others of its kind. The simplest way to do this is to pre-qualify new articles against a standard prior to actual publishing in the website. The standard is used to gauge any articles in terms of relevance, import and usefulness to the site’s intended audiences.

Articles and other content should always be fresh. This means that frequent updates and constantly adding uniquely interesting material to the site is in order.

Submitting Links to Directories

Like their traditional counterparts, online directories are meant to be resources of specific types of information. A link directory contains links that are cataloged according to some form of order, like type or alphabetically. This makes it easier to search for any given item within the directory.

For link building purposes, a website link may be submitted to directories that categorize their indexes by theme, and to generic link directories. However, care should be taken to select only the reputable ones. An effective back link campaign is not so much as getting the most number of links possible, but rather emphasized on the quality of the individual links themselves. A few high quality backlinks will do more for the website than several obscure, mediocre-quality ones.

Blogs

As a way to promote the website further, blogs can be published that includes the site’s link. Alternatively, one can add the site’s link to a reply or comment to an existing blog post. However, the individual should be careful not to blatantly promote the website in any given blog discussion or thread. Exercise subtlety by making sincere and substantive comments. Never attempt to post a disconnected comment to an existing thread that serve only to plug the website being promoted.

Forums

Similar to making blogs, a website owner or promoter can become a member of a special forum and use it as a channel for promoting the website to other members and forum visitors. Mostly, this is done by adding the link to the member signature, which is a utility issued to every affiliate of the forum. Gain prominence in the forum of your choice by consistently writing new topics and comments that are relevant to the body of members as a whole, and this will potentially get your profile, including the link in your signature, noticed.

Like in most blog sites, forum administrators are known to be stringent editors to prevent spam from creeping into their website. Therefore, always structure comments and posts according to forum regulations. Non-conforming items likely run the risk of deletion by these officials.

Social Networks

An emerging channel for effective SEO is the hugely-popular social network. With their vast internet followings, networks such as Facebook and MySpace hold immense opportunities for promoting a website.

Exploiting these channels for their respective promotional values is an effective and cost-free way to improve a website’s search engine ranking and popularity. Though time-consuming at best, such SEO alternatives are worth the effort in the long run