Link building is the development of links from another site on the World Wide Web that all point to your website. Link Building is also an important part of Search Engine Optimization and is much more that choosing a website and requesting a link; it not only brings in more traffic to your website it also helps to give you a better rank on the major search engines. Link building will also help you save money on advertising costs, since link building is a free resource that is readily available to any webmaster that has the knowledge and patience to do it. Unfortunately, link building is a time consuming task, unless you decided to choose to pay a third party company to do the link building for you.


When you want to promote a product or service in face to face business you have many options, but online you don’t have many options, sure there is always word of mouth, but the best way to get the word out about your website is one that many webmasters choose to use, link building. Webmasters will often exchange links with other webmasters or request links from other webmasters so that there is a reference to their website on another website where people that are interested in what they are promoting might visit.


There are a few ways that you as a webmaster can get your link out there on other websites, but first there are few things you need to understand so that you can get the best results from link building. First you need to know the types of links, second you need to understand how to choose the right sites to put your link on, third you need to know how search engines use back links, which are the links on other websites to your website, to rank your page in their search results, and fourth you need to know how the websites you choose affect your page rank.


The first step to link building is knowing what types of links there are; there are reciprocal links and one way links. Reciprocal links are links where one webmaster has a link to your website on their website and in return you have a link on your website to their website. One way links mean just that, a webmaster will provide a link on their website to your website and not require you to put a link on your site to theirs. Search engines will often choose to give sites a higher rank in search results, if those sites have more one way links, but that will be discussed later.


The second thing you need to understand is how to choose the right sites to put your link on. Picking a site out of the blue and requesting them to put a link on their site that points to your site, isn’t the wisest of decisions. When you look for sites to request a link on make sure that the sites you choose are related to the topic that your site is about, for example if your site is about trucks, choosing a site about gardening, is not a good choice to request a link on. The more sites that have links on them that point to your website and are topically related to your website the better your site will rank in search engine results.


The third thing you need to know is how search engines use the back links to rank your site in their results. It’s been mentioned a couple of times that creating back links will help your website rank better in search engine results, the way that happens is every time you request a link on another site the search engines “spider” picks up on that link to your site; if that site is related to the topic that your site is about the search engines adds that in your favor when ranking you. For example, Site A has a link to Site B, a search engines “spider” then finds the link on Site A to Site B, the “spider” then gives that information back to the search engine and the search engine gives Site B a better rating than Site A because Site B has a link on Site A.


The fourth thing you need to know is how the page rank of the site you request a link on affects your page rank. Search engines give you a portion of the page rank of the page that you request a link on. The way the search engines figure that portion is the sites page rank divided by the number of links on the site. For example if the page that you request a link on is a PR 5 and it has 100 links on it you would divide 5 by 100, so the portion of the page rank you would get would be 5/100th or 1/20th of the page rank. Now this is where it gets tricky, a lot of times it is thought that choosing a site with a higher page rank is better, but this is only true if that site has just a few outgoing links; what you really want to keep an eye out for are sites that have high page rank and only a few out going links.


As mentioned earlier there are a few different ways to link build; you can get on your computer and request the links from the individual sites yourself, you can use a third party company that will do the link submission for you, or you can look for a directory. A directory is a site that is like a giant phone book for websites. People create these types of websites that are organized into categories and sub-categories for the purpose of listing one way links. Search engine “spiders” find the directories and consider them to be quality back links. Because directories are visited often their page rank is usually high, so when you list your site you not only get considered a better page you also get a portion of a better page rank.


Now that you understand how to link build and why it’s important, it’s time for you to get out there and start link building. Remember to choose your sites wisely, make sure the sites you choose are related to yours, check for their page rank, check how many links they have on their links page, and decide how you want to build links, do it yourself, hire a third party company, or use a directory.