Link Building Strategies – One Way Link Building For Website Link Popularity

One Way Link Building Secures Long Term Ranking Results By Daria Goetsch

One-way link building is a great way to improve your link popularity and ranking in the search engines. One-way links are more difficult to obtain than traditional reciprocal links, but pay off in securing solid long-term search engine ranking results.

Why Are One-Way Links Helpful?

Link building in general is an important part of making sure your site ranks well in the search engines. Google and many of the other search engines include link popularity as part of the way they evaluate the web pages they include in the search engine databases.

Links are seen as a positive “vote” towards the quality of the web page. Each individual page acquires link popularity based on the pages that link to it. Google and Yahoo both have toolbars showing the page rank of pages you visit, so you can use these tools to get a good estimate of your pages’ link popularity.

It is not necessaryto get totally caught up in the minutia of which types of links from which types of pages are the most important. The bottom line is this: acquiring links pointing back to your website, particularly links from sites covering the same or related topics as your site, is helpful in the overall scheme of search engine ranking.

The big “plus” of one-way links is that you don’t have to worry about linking back to a “bad neighborhood”. If your site has links pointing back to sites that serve as “linkfarms” or “free-for-all” sites, you may not gain, and could actually lose page rank.

These sites are rarely focused, and tend to have links to and from all different sorts of sites. Since there is no particular topical emphasis here, it is clear to Google and the other search engines that the sole purpose of these sites is to artificially increase the number of links pointing to your site. Since there is no value added for the search engine’s users, they in turn give no value to these links.

Another advantage to these focused, one-way links is that they will tend to stay in place. A website that features a link to your site probably does so because that site’s owner thinks that their visitors will benefit from the content your site has to offer.

Rather than simply trying to manipulate search results, they want to add to the experience of their visitors; you benefit from having a long term link in place. Sites featuring reciprocal links maysimply drop your link when it no longer suits their linking strategy.

How Do I Obtain Natural Links?

Building good content helps interest your visitors and keepsthem on your website. By becoming an authority on your topic, you will attract more visitors. When another websitein essence “votes” for the quality of your website byplacing a link pointing back to it, you are obtaining natural linking.

The more you can build upon helpfularticles, FAQs and white papers, etc., the better reason forvisitors to link back to your website because of the qualitycontent.

One-Way Linking Sources

There are a number of ways to get links from other sitesback to yours. The most important principle to keep in mindis that you will get the most links when you offer somethingsignificant to link to. Think of what you can provide thatpeople will want to link to:

* Natural links given from topic-related websites that likeyour website

* Providing free content, such as access to articles,e-books, FAQ’s and white papers

* Directory links, listed under the category related to yourtopic

* Business directory links, listed under the categoryrelated to your topic

* Blogs, submitted to a blog directory and archived online

* Business associations, listed under the category relatedto your topic

* Newsletter text ads promoting your business, archivedonline at topic-related websites

* Original articles, submitted to and archived online attopic-related websites

* Original press releases, submitted to and archived onlineat topic-related websites

* Original newsletters, submitted to and archived online attopic-related websites

* White papers, submitted to and archived online attopic-related websites

* E-books, submitted to and archived online at topic-relatedwebsites

* Free software tools provided with required link back towebsite

For each of these types of content, you will want to have anactive link pointing back to your site. Of course, whencreating your own original content, always archive your ownwork on your website to build your content and increase yourown link popularity by growing the number of pages on yourwebsite.

The extra value of one-way links is the fact that you arealso promoting your website from the listing as well as theactive link. Articles, newsletters, white papers, directoryand business association links may bring in traffic fromvisitors who are interested in the description of yourwebsite listing.

How Do I Know The Links Are Valid?

To gain the most benefit from your links, the link back toyour web page should be one that can be followed by thesearch engine robots. Plain old text links and image linksusually can be followed by the search engine robots.

More exotic types of links, like JavaScript links, cannottypically be followed by the search engine robots. When youprovide suggested linking code, the simpler the better.Don’t be afraid to suggest linking formats to owners ofsites that link to you. The types of links that serve yourpurposes best will generally provide their visitors with thebest experience as well.

Check to see if the page where the link will be located canbe found in the search engine results. You can search viathe entire website or by individual page. Different searchengines use different syntax in looking for individual pagesand links; refer to the advanced search function for eachsearch engine for details.

Google Search Example:

Shows indexing of all pages listed in website

site:www.websitedomainname.com

Shows indexing of a specific web page in website

info:www.websitedomainname.com/pagename.html

If the page is listed in the search engine results, thismeans the page has been indexed by the search engine robots.This means the web page is valid for indexing and that yourlink will be picked up as well.

Research And Quality Content Equal Success

One-way link building means hard work and long termdetermination to achieve good link popularity. By improvingthe quality of your website, you improve the chance toobtain good quality natural links.

Spend a set amount oftime each week to seek out quality one-way links to achieveyour goal. By using this long-term game plan you will beable to safely build links for optimum link popularitysuccess.

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Optimization company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Promotion since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing.

http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved.
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