Link Building Basics (Part 2)

In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of link building – what it is, how it works, and how you can make your website more link friendly. Today, we’ll be offering some practical advice on how to go about obtaining those links.

There are a wealth of options on the Web to help you build a strong network for your site. We are going to offer you some practical advice on how to get started. We’ll cover Do-Follow vs. No-Follow links, social media, article writing, link requests and widgets.

By the end of this article, you should have a pretty firm understanding of how to go about link building your own site. You’ll find that link building—while a lot of work—is a crucial aspect of SEO that should not be neglected. Whether you do the work yourself, or hire a professional SEO company like TopofTheFirstPage, doing the necessary legwork for proper link building can have a huge payout when it comes to getting page ranks for your site.

Every link on the internet is either tagged as “no-follow” or “do-follow”. As a general rule, you want others to put “do-follow” links to your site. Links that are tagged in this way are counted by the search engines when determining page rankings.

If a link is tagged as “No-Follow” can still help to bring visitors to your website. However, these links are not counted by search engines and are therefore less effective in terms of SEO.

This is important to keep in mind when making link requests. You’ll want to verify that other sites who link to you are leaving their links “Do-Follow”.

Using Social Media

Popular social media portals like Twitter and Facebook can be extremely valuable when building a network for your site. Not only are these sites free for business and personal users alike, but they can provide an immediate SEO jolt simply by being associated with your site.

Depending on your niche, you can also find social networks that are devoted solely to that niche. Whether you are site is built around gaming, science, or entrepreneurship you can also be certain there is a social network devoted to that topic. All you have to do is look.

Keep in mind that links from many of these social sites are no-followed (there’s a great add-on for Firefox called NoDoFollow to help you easily check). However, they can still be valuable as traffic sources and as a way to spread the word about your site. By creating accounts on these sites and keeping those accounts active with micro blog entries, image uploads, status updates, etc, you’re boosting your brand name and providing an opportunity for people to know who you are and link back to you.

Writing useful articles within your niche can be another excellent option for networking and link building. Using sites like HubPages and Squidoo to get the word out about what you do, the services you provide, and/or the topics you are interested in can build loyalty for your website, and can be a key to link building.

Sometimes the direct approach can also be the most effective. There is certainly nothing wrong with requesting that others within your niche link back to your website. If the request is made tastefully, and your site has value, most people will be happy to accommodate. If you are using social media, you should already be building a network of others within your niche that would be happy to link to your website.

Creating Widgets

Even if you are not a developer, creating widgets for your site is probably easier then you think. There are plenty of tutorials online, and this can be a great way of providing link-backs to your website.

If you create a useful widget that others will want to add to their blogs, you can integrate a tasteful link back to your website within the widget.

This can be a great method for self promotion. The more useful your widget, the more people will use it. That means more links to your website, and better rankings on search engines!

We hope these two articles have served as a useful primer in the area of link building. You should now have enough information to start building a strong network for your website. Please feel free to leave feedback on this article, or direct any questions about what you have read here over to us at our main website, TopOfTheFirstPage.com. You can also find out more about SEO for HubPages by visiting our other article, "Get Your Hub to the Top of the First Page!"