Link building is the process of finding other websites to link to your site, and building links from their sites to yours, using the keywords you want to rank for with search engine optimization. The link is usually built around a keyword or phrase called the anchor text. You basically want to have as many websites as possible linking to you with that keyword in the link.

In the late ‘90s, AOL was the dominant search engine provider, along with Netscape, and then the search engine called Google identified that the more links a site has, the more authority it has. This is similar to the citations in academic papers, where the more citations or references that a particular paper has, the more authority it is seen to have. It is this strategy that has made Google the dominant search engine on the Internet today.

Why PageRank Is Important

Google came up with was a formula call PageRank. PageRank is defined as follows:

Every web page on the Internet has a particular PageRank value. This is its value in the context of the Web. The more sites that link to a particular site, the more PageRank that site has. For example, adobe.com has 211,139,830 links into their site, which is why their PageRank is nine out of ten. A brand new site that has no incoming links has a PageRank just above zero.

The key to a successful link building campaign is to get as many links from high PageRank sites as possible. To give you an example, it is more powerful to have one link from a page with PageRank 8 than 50 links from a page with PageRank zero.

So How Do I Get These Links?

Getting other websites to link to you is the hard part – fortunately there are strategies you can use to start building links right away. The following strategies can be used to build links regardless of whether you have PageRank or not, and regardless of whether you can get other websites to link to you or not.

1. Set Up A WordPress Blog

If you’re a new site, you may not have a lot of PageRank yet and probably no rankings either. So if you want to improve your rankings and your PageRank, how is this possible? The first thing which you need to do from a link building perspective is to setup a WordPress blog on your website.

A WordPress blog is the best type of software to use for blogging, because of its search engine optimization (SEO) customizations. It also has a lot of plug-ins that help optimize it for search engine optimization.

2. Write And Post

Once you have your blog, it’s important that you write an information-rich piece of content and post it onto the blog at least once a week. The reason that you must post regularly to the blog is because:

• Firstly, it increases the size of the site, which in turn increases the amount of PageRank that you control. When properly used, your blog can assist your main site in ranking higher.
• Secondly, search engine spiders will return more often if they see that your site is regularly being updated.
• Thirdly, it provides fresh content for the search engines, which is what they love most.
  

3. Submit to Article Directories And Social Bookmark

Once it’s posted to the blog, you can then take that article and submit it to article directories, such as ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. At the same time, you should social bookmark the site at sites such as reddit.com, delicious.com and digg.com.This is important to build links into the blog as well as extend the reach of that article.

With article marketing, you submit the articles to the article directories and then other website owners can take an article and place it on their website and link back to your website as a credit in the article’s resource box. You also get a link from the article directory itself.

Social bookmarking is similar, in that you ‘bookmark’ your article on the social bookmarking site to get a link from the social bookmarking site. More importantly you also build exposure to your articles through the millions of users who use those sites and, if your articles are good enough, get links from those users as well.

Other Link Building Strategies

Additional ways of building links include:

• submitting your website to SEO friendly directories
• contacting other sites directly and requesting a link on their site (either free or paid)
• submitting press releases online at places such as prweb.com.

Link Building Tools

Some SEO tools you can use to help you access whether a link is valuable or not include seoquake.com and searchstatus.com. For both of these tools you’ll need to have the Firefox Internet browser installed, and you can then install Seoquake and SearchStatus as plug-ins to Firefox.

The key to a successful link building strategy in the early stages of your SEO campaign is having excellent content (ie articles) which you can use to extend your online reach. Manual link building and link exchange are also beneficial but it can be a hit and miss strategy, whereas a content-based strategy has a 100% success rate, that is, every minute you spend writing articles, marketing them and social bookmarking them has a direct benefit to your SEO rankings.