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Link Building 101

By Joseph Parish

I would be hard pressed to provide a complete course in link building in such a short amount of space such as this, however I would like to present a few basic fundamentals to you in order to get you started down the SEO road.

We have all heard about the importance that both Yahoo and Google search engines place on links when determining site rankings. One can think of links as individual votes and the more of these links that you have the higher you end up in the rankings.

When venturing around the net we find several types of links. The first type being the “internal link”. This link is nothing more then a link on the same site to another page of the site. An “external link” on the other hand will navigate you from one website to another. When your site is being linked in this manner to another it is known as a “backlink”.

With this under our belt we can now progress to the four types of links involved in SEO work.

1. The first one is a URL link. This type of link is nothing more then a link to another site.
2. The most common type of link found on the net is the “Text Link”. These are also referred to as static links and are nothing more then a word or phrase that when clicked on will take you to another site.
3. The third type of link is the “Image Links”. Just as they say these are links where one clicks on the image to be transported to another site.
4. Lastly we come to the “Dynamic Links”. These links are usually constructed in a particular programming language such as JavaScript. Although these types will also take you to another website they may also have other functions as well.

As an SEO professional you should be able to easily recognize each of the above stated links.

Links provide the proper navigation needed by both human visitors as well as search engine spiders to allow either a visit or to index the page. When search engines index your page they gather various bits of information concerning your website and list it within the confines of the search engine database. This allows others to request information from the search page and in return receive links to your site.

You must understand how a search engine functions to be able to manipulate them. When a search engine indexes your site it will follow the links you have listed to travel from one page to another. Search engines do not follow “dynamic links” and as a courtesy to the website it does not follow the html links which are coded as “do not follow”.

These “do not follow” tags are usually embedded within the sites meta tags. The meta tags are bits of information which are intended solely for the search spiders and not for human visitors. To view meta tags select “view source” in your browser.

There are several types of links that you would want to get. These are “One-way links” and “Reciprocal Links”. A one way link is just what it indicates. It is a link to you but no return link is required whereas the Reciprocal link is one where you link back to the site that provided you with a link. To a search engine the one way links are the more valuable ones, however, both links have their own value based on the relevance towards your site, the text associated with the link, the authority of the website which is linking to you, etc.

An important point to be brought up here is that you can have links which have no value what so ever to the search engines but still manages to delivers hundreds or possibly thousands of visitors to your site.

In short, the more sites which link to you the better you will fair with the search engines. Building links can be very time consuming but well worth the effort. This is all we have time for now but it provides you with a starting point to center your efforts on. Good luck.

Copyright @2010 Joseph Parish

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