The Basics to Building Back Links

Building back links to your site can be a valuable means of increasing your websites ranking. Google and most other search engines use links to determine the quality of a website. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards your ranking. Many people have questions about the best practices for organic link building and here are many different perspectives, but our approach is always to follow what is outlined in Google's webmaster guidelines and that is what we want to outline for you.

The best marketing technique for new websites is to get involved in their niche community. Building your brand and reputation alone can drive people to your site. If you are providing quality long-lasting, unique content people will want to recommend it to others by linking to you. Great content is the best tool for organic link building. Interacting and contributing with the community though publishing articles, posting on forums, and through blog commenting and posting can have unmeasurable benefits when you are contributing in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site.

When looking for a promising way to create valuable content for your target group and earn great links try to find a topic that will help them. Think of issues or problems your market might encounter and present them with solutions. Visitors are much more likely to appreciate something like research results, your experience, a tutorial, or a practical tool than reading a sales pitch. Valuable information grows your credibility in your niche market as well as increases your brand visibility. This can help you gain quality, merit-based links that direct traffic and improve your image as an authority.

Directory submissions are another common way to promote younger sites in Google's index. When submitting your site to directories always make sure they are focused on your niche and well moderated as there are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet, but most directories are of lower quality and are generally of no benefit. It is also common to see mass submission services. Most of which are useless and not likely to benefit your site unless it is a quality service ensuring that all links are topical.

There are also other ways to develop links that are not going to be as valuable as the aforementioned. With social media services constantly growing viral marketing techniques are now becoming a larger strategy to increase the visibility of a site. However, these short-lived tactics are wear off quickly. As powerful as viral marketing can be, and as much traffic as you can get, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or your only marketing effort if you are looking to create a site with long term potential.

It's important to understand that developing a sites longevity through legitimate link building is a long term effort. There are those who advocate for short lived methods of link building, but if your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid buying links, mass submissions, or randomly participating in link exchanges. Google considers these to be some of the worst ways of attempting to gather links and it is likely they will have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. Buying and selling links is actually in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results if discovered.

I hope this information has been helpful to you and you have an idea of where you stand as far as a quality link building strategy. As an after thought, when developing links you can use Google webmaster tools to view links to pages on your site located by Google on the web and check your progress. The data Google provides is comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is prove you are the webmaster for the site by adding a small piece of code to the header tag.

In order to help you analyze the data lets look at the two categories links are divided into, external and internal.

External Links

External links are considered to be the links that reside on pages outside of your domain that link to your site. For example, if you are viewing links for idealthis.com, any link not coming from a subdomain of idealthis.com, such as a link from overtairsoft.com, would appear as an external link to your site.

Internal Links

Internal links to your site are come from within your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for idealthis.com, all the links that originate from pages on any subdomain of Google.com, such as idealthis.com/carte or marketing.idealthis.com, would appear as internal links to your site.

We hope you enjoyed this article and remember, there is always more great info to come!

Tucker Stoffers
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