What is Link Building?

Link building is a technical process of generating inbound links in able to optimize websites/ webpages. Building links can be done by submitting articles to e-zines, newsletters, site directories, and by exchanging links with other websites. Building links is one of the best ways to make your site popular to search engines’ eyes.

Advantages of Link Building:

1. It helps generate quality traffic from relevant sites; therefore, increasing sales.

2. If there is a number of incoming quality links to your website, yours will also be viewed as an important source.

3. It helps build your site’s public awareness, popularity and credibility.

4. It helps your site obtain wider search engine coverage.

5. The process of getting indexed by the search engines is faster.

The easiest way to build links is to generate reciprocal links. Reciprocal linking is a process where two webmasters consent on placing each other’s links to their websites.

How to Exchange Links?

Requesting for a link exchange is easy. All you need to do is look for a website with quality content. It is much better if the website has a niche relevant to your own website. Check if they actually have a links page or sometimes referred to as blog roll.

You can then contact the webmaster through email, asking whether it is okay to exchange links. Be friendly and add a personal touch to your letter. And remember to be nice, you are the one asking for a favor here. Do not forget to provide your site’s URL in the email.

Some bloggers or website-owners even agree on link exchanges over their chat boards. This is a less formal approach, but it is still effective if you do it the right way.

Link Building Through Directories

A web directory is a compilation of web pages with related contents and subjects. Using web directories to build links is very popular because they are considered to be a valuable source. Getting listed in directories may help improve your website’s ranking as well. Websites that are included in web directories are more likely to get crawled by the search engine spiders. Submitting to web directories is also a way to create one way links, which is believed to be more important than reciprocal links.

Getting listed in web directories can also help bring you traffic. Web directories bring you traffic in different ways:

1. Click-through traffic – this is when visitors come across your listed links and site information. There is a good chance they will click through the link to visit your site.

2. Increase in ranking – since web directories provide one-way in-bound links, there is a good chance that your website will be awarded an increase in ranking. The higher the ranking, the greater possibility of getting moiré traffic.

Remember that link building is good for both SEO and website traffic. Nevertheless, even if a specific link gives you more traffic, it does not mean that it is good for your website ranking. Webmasters often refrain from linking to spam blogs or websites that are using Black Hat SEO. They believe that by having a reciprocal link with these sites, they will be given less attention by the search engine spiders.

All in all, link building is one of the most vital steps in putting up a website. Just don’t get any harmful sites exchange links with you for good measure.