Link Building : The Why and the Wherefore

Learning to utilize links to bring traffic to your blog or website is an important part of optimization. Links do help improve your search engine ranking, but they are also a powerful traffic source in their own right.There are several types of links and they all serve slightly different purposes. All are ultimately designed to bring more page views back to your own website.

Inbound links are the best links to have. Other website owners who link to you represent that you are an authority in a particular field; it’s like a recommendation to check you out. The very first inbound links you can get are the ones you put in yourself, linking your website to your blog and vice versa.

External links can be valuable if you make them easy to find and use, and if they lead to a valuable site. Sometimes people will bookmark your site and return to it just to find your links! Hopefully they will link to your page, and encourage their friends to do the same.

Internal links go between different pages within your own website, or between different places on the same page. The longer you can keep people bouncing around within your site, the more page views you can rack up!

Reciprocal links are links to other websites that are relevant to your own, who in turn link back to you. You can find other websites to link to by checking directories for similarly themed pages and request a link exchange from them.

Once you have learned how to implement linking, you can start to get fancy. Drop an email to websites that link to you requesting a ‘deep link’ to an internal page in your website. Most visitors who enter websites by way of a deep link check out the home page before they leave, and they might just stay and surf your pages for a while.

Another fancy technique is to use ‘embedded links’. You can use these in your blog or as internal links in page text to prompt a click. Usually you can just make the specific text relating to the linked page be a different color, using code to enable a link directly from the middle of a sentence. These should be used judiciously, however, as too many of them can distract the reader from the flow of the article they are reading.

Another handy trick is the ‘back link’. This is useful if your websites lead readers through a series of pages, and you would like them to return to the starting point when they are through. If this starting point is not the home page (which usually has its own internal link up top) and if it is several pages back (making the browser’s back button less useful) a back link can be inserted and labeled ‘back to start’ or ‘return to **** page’.

Well utilized links can provide a steady stream of traffic over time, and should be looked on as one of the most readily accessible tools to the average website owner.

Watch for information on how to build links and when to use them in future posts!