Link Building

One of the most imporant and often overlooked components of a web marketing campaign is link building. Link building involves researching dozens or hundreds of complimentary websites and approaching them via Emails and phone calls to see if they will link to your website.

At its most basic level, the more links you have coming to your website, the more visibility you'll have and the more products and services you'll sell as a result. Consider what happens if nobody links to your website versus what happens if thousands of websites link to yours. Obviously more links are better.

Taking matters a step further, Google places additional emphasis on websites that have large, quality and relevant websites linking to them. In other words, the more big popular websites that link to you, the higher you'll rank with Google.

The Google Page Rank
According to Google, "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."

To learn more about the Google Page Rank or contribute to the topic, visit this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

The bottom line is that it's good to have lots of links to your website, but it's generally considered better to have a handful of popular, high-quality and relevant websites linking to you than it is to have thousands of worthless and irrelevant websites linking to you. Personally I'd rather have ten really good links than a hundred poor ones.

Link Farms
Some people sign up for "link farms" or link exchanges where they link to 500 websites and 500 websites link back to them. Although this seems like a good idea, link farms are considered a form of search engine spam, they are frowned upon in the search engine optimization world, and can actually cause you a lot more harm than good. If Google or the other popular search engines catch wind of you belonging to a link farm or hanging out in a "bad neighborhood" with lots of seedy websites, your website will be penalized and your search engine ranking can suffer substantially. If you get penalized by Google for unethical or spammy practices, your rankings can suffer for many months, even after the links have been removed...So don't participate in link farms!

Needless to say, we don't participate in link farm activities because we feel that they will only get you in trouble. The best way to build links is to approach popular, complimentary websites, one-at-a-time and offer them reciprocal links on your website if they request it as a gesture of good faith.

To learn more about link farms or contribute to the topic, visit this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm