Small Business Design Resources

What is Link-building?

To understand link-building, first you’ll need to know what is link popularity. Link popularity simply refers to the number and quality of links that are pointing to your site. This shows how popular your site is. If done correctly, this has a great impact on your SEO ranking. If for example the sites that are linking to yours are spam sites, than you will get a lower ranking, but if the sites that are linking to yours are positive sites you’ll get a higher ranking.

So link-building is when you establish a connection with other web sites and ask them to include your link on their site. The search engines want your site to link from authoritative sites, or to have your links come from sites that share the same interest as your site.

The most common way of building links is by link exchange. This is when you exchange links with the site that you want your link to appear on. Now, remember that not every site owner will agree to a link exchange, specially if they’re your competition.

Here are some tips on link exchange:
1. Exchange links from web sites that will bring your target audience to your site. Target audience are visitors that would be interested in your products/services.

2. DO NOT request a link exchange just from anybody. For example, if you’re selling shoes don’t request a link exchange from a dentist. This would not benefit your target audience and in fact may lower your ranking with the search engines.

3. Make sure your web site is complete with valuable content for your visitors. Most web site owners will not exchange links with you if there’s nothing of interest to your target audience on your site.

4. Keep your link pages to a maximum of 25 links per page and make sure it’s search engine friendly.

5. When requesting for a link exchange, Always add their link on your page first and them request a for them to place your link on their site.

6. Keep your link title and description short. Try to keep the description to no more than 200 characters.

7. Make it even easier for them to include your link on their site, give them the exact HTML code to cut and paste on their site. You can even create banners/buttons with your link and provide that for a link exchange.