Link Building Basics: How to Create Links for SEO

Introduction

Websites linking to each other form the foundation of how search engines work and evaluate how to rank the results they display. Because of this, link-building is a very important, if not the most important aspect of SEO (search engine optimization).

If you want your website to show up on page one on Google for a popular search term, what you need above all else are links pointing to your site. But how do your get those links?

Read on to learn about several link-building methods.

3 Kinds of Link Sources

Generally speaking, your site can gain backlinks in three different ways:

1. People discover your site, like it and mention it on their blogs or save it on a social bookmarking site (e.g. Digg). This is what could be called "natural" backlinks.
2. You negotiate link-exchanges with other site owners (i.e. you link to them and they link to you).
3. You create those backlinks yourself.

In many ways, obtaining "natural" backlinks is ideal. However, this kind of backlinking is heavily biased towards sites that are already successful. After all, if your site doesn't have good rankings for any keywords, then chances are that no one will know about it and so no one will link to it (no matter how good your content is).

Negotiating link exchanges is a very good way of obtaining very high-value backlinks from sites related to yours. The main problem with it is that this method is very time-consuming and it's best if you have several, high-PR sites at your disposal so you are in a position ot negotiate with people who own high-PR sites themselves. Once again, you need to already have a popular site in order to make your site more popular...

For this reason, I want to focus on links you can build yourself, since these types of links are something that can get your site "on the map", so to speak, even if you're starting out from scratch.

How and Where to Build Links

The following is a list of many different ways and places where you can create links of your own:

Article Directories

Article directories are very popularly used for building links. These sites allow anyone to submit articles on a variety of subjects and those articles can be used and republished by anyone, as long as credit is given to the original author (this is called content syndication). The thing here is that you can add a link or two of your choosing to the bottom of each article.

There are many hundreds of article directories. Here are a few of the more popular ones:

• Ezinearticles
• Goarticles
• Article Dashboard
• iSnare
• Articles Base

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social Bookmarking sites let you save your favourite sites and share them with other users you are connecter with. Of course, every site is saved in the form of a link, so these bookmarking sites can also be used to build backlinks.

Because social bookmarking is one of the easiest ways to build backlinks, they are often abused just for this purpose and many spammers target such sites. The result of this is that most social bookmarking sites have pretty strict rules about what you are allowed to submit and purely promotional content is generally not welcome. Also, many bookmarking sites "nofollow" their links. "Nofollow" is basically an attribute that tells Google: "This links doesn't count, ignore it".

Social bookmarking only works as a link-building tactic if it is done carefully. Don't be spammy and don't submit too many sites or sites that are too promotional. If you take care not to violate the terms of service of the bookmarking site you are using, you can still get beneficial results, though.

Other Content Sharing Sites

The two examples above have something in common: In both cases, people share some sort of content (articles, links to sites they like) with other people. Similarly, there are content-sharing sites for many different types of content and most of them can be used as link-building tools to some extent.

Here are some examples of other content sharing sites:

• scribd - for sharing documents
• slideshare - for sharing PowerPoint presentations
• YouTube, Dailymotion and many more - for sharing videos

Again, many of these sites have had to take measures to protect themselves against spammers, but if you use them wisely, they can still help you a lot with site-promotion.

Free Blogging Platforms

There are many services that allow you to create free blogs of your own, where you can post pretty much anything you like. Of course, there are also certain boundries concerning what kind of content you can post, but adding links to whatever sites you want to link to usually isn't a problem.

Here are some sites where you can create free blogs:

• Blogger
• DoodleKit
• tumblr
• Posterous

Forums

Forums are yet another place online where you can create links to your own sites. Once again, I need to mention spammers, however. You can bet that any even semi-popular forum has already had to stave off hordes of spammers trying to insert their links all over the place. If you try to blatantly promote a site on a forum, you probably won't last long. The right thing to do is to join forums on topics that interest you, participate in the discussions and add a link to your signature. This is allowed and welcome on practically every forum.

Paid Backlink Building Methods

All of the examples so far were for link-building methods that are free to do. There are some more options for link-building if you are willing to pay a fee and here are a few of those:

Link-Building Services

You can find companies and individuals who offer SEO and link buidling services for a fee. Mostly, this means that someone else is going to go to article directories, social bookmarking sites, etc. and place links for you (instead of you doing it yourself).

Article Networks

Article Networks are services that work in a similar fashion to article directories. Instead of posting your article on a single site, the article will be sent to dozens or even hundreds of blogs in the network, however. This is potentially very powerful for getting your site ranked and the only downside is that most of these networks cost quite a lot to join.

Three-Way Linking Scripts

You can obtain scripts to install on your site that will automatically link out to other users of the script who have sites on the same topic as yours and in return you will receive links from other sites using the script as well. The script makes sure that there is no reciprocal linking (i.e. not the same sites linking back and forth, because this reduces link value). These types of links can be helpful, but only to a certain degree. A 3-way linking script is not something I'd recommend you spend a lot of money on.

Some Links Are More Equal Than Others...

Not every link you get will have the same amount of value for your SEO efforts. Below is a video I've made, explaining the basics of how to tell whether a backlink is more or less valuable to your site:

Feedback Very Welcome!

This here is my first hub and if you made it this far down the page, I'd be very greatful if you could leave a quick comment. Did you like this page? What could I improve? Any questions left unanswered?

Thanks!