Before I get started, I just want to clear up the usages of a link building and the basic knowledge of a link:
What is a link?
In general a link reffered to a relationship between two things or situations, especially where one affects the other. In computer technology, a link which is also termed as hyperlink uses the anchor set of tags to reference to data that the reader can directly follow either by clicking or by hovering. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks.
A Hyperlink Example
<a href="http://www.mysite.com">My first link</a>
As per Google links help the crawlers find a site and can give the site greater visibility in Google search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Types of links for link building
These four types of links helps in creating a link building strategy.
Internal: Linking in between pages under the same domain/your own site.
Organic: Links showed up on a search result and clicked by someone which takes that user to your website.
Incoming: A link from somewhere on the net that points to your site. These show up in your website stats as referrals if someone clicked the link and arrived at your site.
Outbound: A link on your site that links to another site.
All of these types of links are analyzed by the search engine robots and count as part of their scoring system when determining how your indexed page fits the search term someone typed in the search box.
Why you need a link building strategy?
Link building strategy plays a major role to save your time and money, if you pay for incoming links. The purpose of creating a link building should meet your targeted audience to enrich the quality of the traffics.
The purpose of a link building strategy is to put in place a plan to build high quality, targeted incoming traffic. Having incoming links creates visibility for a website. It also adds credibility because each quality, targeted back-link counts as a vote for a site as far as a search engine bot is concerned. Also, each link placed among relevant content to a product or service enhances the chances of making a sale.
The most effective link building techniques for top rankings
1. Publish and share your best stuff
People won’t link to your content unless they see it. At the same time, you need the right people in front of your content; not everyone is a potential linker. This is where social media, content marketing, and brand awareness comes into the link building realm. Getting people to see and know your content & brand is a massively important strategy to build links.
2. Ask for backlinks
Having said that a few people whom I trust claim they’ve done experiments with the effect of social media sharing on search ranking. They claim that what Google says is true, with one important and notable exception, which is Google Plus. Often a Google Plus mention of a webpage ranks higher than the webpage itself.
3. MozRank
A MozRank (mR) shows how popular a given web page is on the web. Pages with high MozRank scores tend to rank better. The more links to a given page, the more popular it becomes. Links from important pages (like http://www.cnn.com or http://www.irs.gov) increase a page’s popularity, and subsequently its MozRank, more than unpopular websites.
A page’s MozRank can be improved by getting lots of links from semi-popular pages, or a few links from very popular pages.
4. Write for other websites
This is a good way to start, especially if you are a beginner in SEO Link Building. Think about your near and dears, friends, colleagues and clients those having a website too. All you need to ask them for a backlink. There are many service providers who does this job in lieu of payment. Always a in-content links worked better than links in the sidebar or footer.
But be careful and make sure that the backlink comes from a website that are synonyms to your work, otherwise it may even be harmful than increasing your web rank.
5. Domain authority
Moz Domain Authority (or DA) is a query-independent measure of how likely a domain is to rank for any given query. DA is calculated by analyzing the Internet’s domain graph and comparing a given domain to tens of thousands of queries in Google.
6. Participate in online forums
The strategy of drawing traffic and links to your site via online forums is fairly simple.
When you see someone ask a question that you have an answer to, answer the question via a short blog post on your website. Then go back to the forum and reply with a summary of the answer and a link to the article on your website.
If the forum supports dofollow links, the link itself will help your search ranking. If the links in the forum are nofollow, you should still use this strategy since it will ultimately help you build your reputation and others might be sharing your answer, respectively the URL.
7. List your site in trustworthy directories
Google and Bing seek to discount the influence of paid links in their organic search results. While it is impossible for them to detect and discredit all paid links, the search engines put a lot of time and resources into finding ways to detect these. Websites caught buying links or participating in link schemes risk severe penalties that will drop their rankings into oblivion. Notwithstanding these efforts, link buying sometimes works; many search professionals wish the search engines would do even more to discourage it.
We at Moz recommend spending your time on long-term link building strategies that focus on building links naturally.
What not to do?
Avoid to create multiple copies of a page under different URLs, which may result in deceptive and may ignore your site.
A must read articel describing “10 Illustrations on Search Engines’ Valuation of Links” is provided on The Moz Blog by Rand Fishkin.
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