Building Website Links

When building website links there are many things to consider.

Gone are the days of putting links everywhere and not caring who we link to, or who links to us.

Link building has become very important for top ranking in any search engine, but there are something's you don't want to do.

First, lets understand that there are two parts to building website links. The first part is links that point to your website. That is to say, other websites or blogs, etc.that have posted a link to your site.

These are the most important links to help you rank well on Google's first page or any search engine for that matter. But beware here! It used to be that you could gather a bunch of links from anybody and you would achieve a good rank.

Goggle got wise to that right away. So for example, say you have a website about fishing, and your brother-in-law has a site about model trains and he added a link on his site pointing to yours. That use to help you.

Not anymore! Why? Simple. Google is all about the use experience. In order for them to provide a better search engine they need to improve their accuracy and relevance of their search returns.

So, in the above example, the train site has no relevance to the fishing site and visa versa.

If both the above websites each had a link pointing to each other that would be referred to as a reciprocating link.

Reciprocating links are now frond upon, at least by Google. When it comes to building website links now, you want "one-way links".

One-way links simple means a link from a website pointing to your website or a particular page on your website, where you are not linking back to that site.

Now you must understand that the website linking back to you must be related to the subject matter on your website or the webpage they are linking to.

Don't attempt to circumvent this rule. If you do you will be hurting yourself.

Link farms (for those who do not know) are places where you can buy hundreds of incoming links to your website. As I stated above, the problem here is that these links are not of good quality and will not be relevant to your websites content.

O.K. so here's what you are looking to accomplish when building website links (inbound).

You want to make sure you get good quality, high ranking websites to point a link to your website. Here are some of the best ways to achieve this.

Get your site listed in as many directories as you can. Do a search on Google for directories. Most of them are free and some are paid. I use the free ones, although I have paid for some on occasion.

I have some listed on my member's page. There is also some free software on the web that will help you with this. The process takes time, but it is a must in the long term.

The next thing you can do, is to post a link to your website or webpage on forums. Do a search for forums about your sites topic. Then, go there and start to participate in the treads. Answer some questions posted by people and include a link to your site in the answer or in your personal information part of the post.

The next area for building website links is in the area of social websites. Many forks are now building Myspace and Facebook pages, and getting links back to their website from there.

Another great way to get links to your site is through article publication. There are many sites where you can write an article about your websites topic and have it published.

Ezines is one such place. If you are going to go this route (and I encourage you to) you will need to do some keyword research for your article as this is how others will find your articles.

The second part of building website links involves links within your own website.

This can get very tricky; especially when you add in the way Google determines page rank. So for the sake of simplicity, and to give you some basic things you need to know, we will not get into page rank percentages in this article.

The first thing you want to do is have your pages linked together in both your page navigation, and in the footer. These must be in the form of a text link. As I mentioned in How To Use SEO, search engine spiders can't read images. You MUST use text links.

Next, you will want to link your pages together by "in text" links or "content" links. This is where you link 'keywords" from one page to another on our site. On this page you will see the above paragraph has a link to "How To Use SEO".

This accomplishes two things. First, it provides an internal page link that is in "content" to another page on my website, and it also uses the keyword in the link. This is very important.

You always want your keywords or keyword phrase to be in your link.

Here's a great example of a huge mistake just about everyone makes (including myself sometimes).

Lets say you have a link with the word "Home" on all your webpages so folk can move around your site. And you should, although you may want to call it something different than home.

I suggest you use the name of your website. Anyway, I also recommend this as some website designers don't use this. Rule number one about building a website say's you "never want to use the back button on the browser's navigation bar as a means of navigating through your website".

O.K. now that we all understand. Lets look at where the problem arises.

When you use the word "Home" in this link the search engines, think that your are trying to rank for that keyword. See the problem? I am pretty sure you are not trying to rank well for the keyword "home". If you used your website name here for example, you could rank well for that keyword, or at least try too!

If you must use the word "home" as I do sometimes, I have a great solution.

Drum role please: Enter the "no follow tag". This is an html tag created by Google to simple tell the search engine spider not to follow or don't count that link.

This means you will not be giving up any page rank when you use this tag. So, in the above example using "Home" you would not be hurting yourself if you use the no follow tag.

Here's what it looks like: Home

Another cool deal with the no follow tag is you can (and should) use it when you are making reference to another website from your website, and you don't want that link to be counted or followed by the search engines.

The last linking strategy we will cover here is where your folders are located with respect to your linking strategy.

You should never have any pages that you are tying to rank well for any deeper than two folders deep.

Search engine spiders are lazy and get tired easy! Therefore you should always make things as easy as possible for them to find.

Seriously, the real story is the robots figure that if the subject matter is that far away from the home page or main root of your site, its not that important.

As a general rule of thumb, the farther away your links are from your home page the worst they will rank.

However, if you keep all your important pages on the root than this shouldn't be a problem. I cover the proper file and folder placement in detail in Pro Website Maker.

If you implement these simple rules of building website links you should out rank your competition, as most of them are not doing this!