Linking Basics: An Introduction To Link Building.
If you only concentrated on website (on-page) search engine optimization for better rankings in the search engines, you'd be absolutely selling yourself short and miss the mark entirely. It's vital to include link popularity as a component in your overall website marketing strategy.
Link popularity (ie. the amount of links you have pointing to your site) has become THE most important factor when determining where a site will rank on the search results list. While it may sound easy, there's much more to this process than simply finding any site that will link out to you.
Link building should be done right the first time, with the proper tools, training, and knowledge. For example, links must be from quality sites related to yours and grow slowly over time, which looks more natural to the search engines.
The general idea is this: if your website is a good website, then it will have more sites linking to it. What this then amounts to is a voting system. When you vote in the elections, you give your vote to the person whom you think is the best. The more votes a person gets, the higher their popularity. In the end, the person with the highest amount of votes is declared the winner.
Similar is the case with link popularity. When results are compiled in the search engines, the search engines count all of the 'votes' to all the websites, and use this as one of their criteria to rank websites in their index. Although there are many factors, some criteria used in a search engine's ranking algorithym are more heavily weighted than others. They base their results to a large extent on the amount of votes received for a particular website.
Of course the best way to garner all natural and powerful links to your website is by providing content that users can't help but link to. If on the other hand you don't have the resources or creativity required to create a true resource, there are many ways to find the right links that simulate natural website popularity growth as covered in the next few articles.
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