Link Building For Newbies

I can admit that link building used to be a big mystery to me so I created this bub to help people understand it and how to do it safely and properly.

Why bother getting backlinks (link building) to a site, or sites?

Getting backlinks helps increase your visibility in the eyes of the search engines, since each backlink is considered a "vote" for your site.  the more natural, quality backlinks your site receives, the better it will do in the SERPs, A.K.A. rankings.

You don't necessarily receive more website traffic from the sites that link to you, not usually, but the links you get can increase your search engine visibility and that leads to more organic traffic from the search engines when your keywords are search for and your site appears high up enough in the SERPs to get someone to notice your site url, then click on the listing, then come to your site.

Is link building safe?

If you practice proper link building etiquette and strategies, then Yes, link building is safe.  Proper link building strategies include the link veloicty, which means how fast-and-furious your link acqusition rate is.

Aside from link velocity, links source sis also an important concern, because you want the sources of the backlinks to your sites to be reputable and hopefully, theme-related sites (sites that are similar in theme and topic to yours).

How and where to get backlinks for link building?

• Forums (if they allow for signature files in forum profiles)
  
• Social bookmarking
• Other related sites
• Article marketing
• Reciprocal links
• 3 way links
• RSS feed submissions
• and a whole lot more...

What's the best way for a link building newbie to get started with minimal link building?

Article marketing is labor-intensive, but produces the best results for your time and effort.  With article marketing, you write articles, then submit them for publication to article directories.

Since the top article directories are all top quality, trusted, authority sites, the links obtained form your articles will not only send direct traffic your way, but will also result in a quality backlink on a per article basis.

If you're feeling like you want to take article marketing to an advanced level, then you want to check out some article syndication services to syndicate your unique articles to a lot of sites at once..

To understand link building you need to understand that there are some attributes assigned to backlinks, and these are broekn down into 2 type sof attributes; DoFollow and NoFollow.

Do Follow link attributes tell the search engines to Follow wherever a link on a site points to, thereby giving credit to the destination url in the link for whatever link juice and anchor text might get passed along with that link. 

NoFollow link attributes tell the search engines that see your links to apply less link juice and "SEO weight" to the links, thereby sending less value link-wise ot the site or url being linked to.

If you have an affiliate marketing website for instance, you want to apply NoFollow link attributes to outgoing links to the vendor sites to lessen the negative effect of linking outbound which lessens the overall link juice of your site.However, you want to use DoFollow link attributes for internal link building, when you reference another url on your site.

What is link juice?

You've probably read about link juice ealrie rin this article and are wondering wha tit means exactly...

The dumbed-down definition would be that link juice is the amount of power, seo-wise to the links generated to and from sites.  If your websites has a lot of quality inbound links, and doesn't link outwards, out outbound too often, then your site will have a decent amount of link juice.

But link juice also applies to the links you're getting too.  If you're getting quality inbound links but they're all Nofollow, then you're not getting a lot of link juice from the Nofollow links.

There's a lot of myths out there about link building so I'm going to dispel some of the link building myths in short order to keep you on the right track.

Myth #1 - Write good content and people will link to your content naturally.

This unrealistic, and doesn't happen in the real world unless you have a dominant authority site that has a lot of people watching your content, reading it, and using your super-high-value content site as a resource.

Myth #2 - Getting links from bad neighborhoods will affect your rankings.

Again, not true otherwise your competitors could knock you out of the SERPs by sending these "bad links" your way.  If it was at all possible, you'd need to get 1000s of spammy links in a very short amount of time, and all that would happen would be your site would drop out of the SERPs for a while, then bounce back, maybe even higher-ranked than ever.

I don't know of any forum spam linkers who would risk sending thousands of links from bad neighborhoods to their competitors' sites, knowing that some of those links could stick.

Myth #3 - You don't need backlinks if you use LSI and great content that gets linked to

LSI in a nutshell means using related thematic words in your content.  If you site is about roses then you need to use all of the words that naturally come to mind when talking or writing about roses.  That's how the search engines use LSI to rank sites better, but publishing well-LSI-ed content still isn't good to get you top-ranked witohut baklinks, but it sure would make things easier.

You see, no site can exist or fluorish as an island, meaning that no site can be deemed a quality site without someone or something noticing it and giving it a "vote", ie, a backlink.

While using and writing LSI style can help your sites rank easier, you still need some backlinks in order to rank at the top,

The goal of link wheeling is to create link juice for your money sites.

Link juice comes from having some links pointing towards the properties that are linking to other properties.

Link juice is also reliant upon the trust an authority of the site tha tis hosting oyur content, like Squidoo, Hubs, wetpaint, weebly etc....

The way link wheeling is supposed ot work is you start with the easily obtained backlinks like social bookmarking and pliggs.

Since these links are so easily obtained, it stands to reason they possess less value, but their strength is in numbers,; you can get a lot of thme easily enough and you use them to build em to build backlinks towards better quality sites tha tin turn provide better backlinking power..

So what do you use pliggs and social bookmarking to get backlinks to, what "properties"?

Remember to always keep in mind that link wheels are for the purpose of developing powerful links to your end destination sites without directly linking to them except for the last step in the wheel.

You use the lower quality liks sources to get backlinks to better quality link source,s ie, web 2.0 properties you don't own and control.

A lot of newbies to link building have heard about something called profiles link building, which is the practice of creating profiles at high Page Rank sites.

When you create a profile with these sites, you're allowed to flesh out your member profile area, and this is where you get to add your links to whatever site you want.  This is called profiles link building or profiles linking.

Does Profiles Link Building Work and is it Spam linking?

There are membership sites that offer a low-cost service that discovers new sources for places to build profiles links on and these links packets are then released to many people.  Since a lot of people are using these packets, there is a swarm of people going to these places at the beginning of every month and building their spammy profiles.

The site owners are catching on to this and threatening legal action and banning some people from their sites, but these sites owners are few and far between and their threats are empty threats.

The fact remains that joining sites for the sole purpose of putting backlinks in your profile to your desired urls is spammy since it provides no value and memberships were created fo rno other reason than that.  However, this is not a big deal, it's harmless, doesn't hurt anyone so it's not worth having any moral palpitations over.

To make these profiles work best for you:

Avoid automated solutions that create profiles and post your links to them.

Do these profiles creations manually.

Customize your profiles, add some new articles, interact with the communities you just joined so you seem like a legitimate new member and to ensure your profiles stay active and don't get deleted.

Make your profile on theme and relevant to your destination sites being linked to, by writing some text that has some of your sites' main keywords in there and some biographical stuff too.

The more you customize these profiles, the better your results will be

I remember about a year and a half ago, I had a marketing coach tell me that I had to learn about traffic generation, seo, link building, social media etc...

1. And I was admittedly confused about how it all worked.
2. Then I started to "see the light" and grasp the concepts behind SEO, Link Building, exposure versus rankings etc....
3. Then I started implementing what I'd learned along the way
4. And it got tough, laborious, frustrating, you name it...because some link building services don't work well and are just hyped up guru launches, while finding the really effective services was like finding a needle in a haystack.

Anyways, I've come across something new (at the time of this writing) that makes link building quite easy to do and its very effective, too.

Before I tell you what it is, let me just say that you'll see extreme leverage here if you promote the program a little bit, but you'll still experience great SEO leverage when you use this system.

The system/service is called EZArticleLink and it works well.They even have a free option and you can read all about it on the Hub I linked to above.

Now, the other service I mentioned that newbies to traffic generation and SEO will love does something entirely different.

It doesn't rely on SEO or link building at all, but it does have some powerful leveraging concepts behind it.

If you've ever heard of ViralURL you know how powerful that service still is to this day.  Well, the new service I am talking about is very much like that but its 100% FREE.

To read more about this service, too, go to How To Get Free Website Traffic That Converts

A commenter on this hub (Jody) asked about buying links and it seems like he/she might have had bad experiences with them in the past.

MOST places that publicly advertise that they're selling links are delivering spammy-type links and their link networks are usually discovered rather easily.  So in most instances you don't want to buy or rent links from webmasters or link networks.

However, as a link building expert I can tell you that there are some ways in which you can buy text links that are of good quality, unique and end up being very effective, too. These types of links are usually delivered by link masters who build up a network of high PageRank sites that have a lot of link juice (inbound links versus outbound links).

Another way to look at "renting" links is buying paid advertising spots on high traffic blogs and while this isn't really an SEO method that's long lasting, it is still immedaite increasedexpsoure which is what SEO doe sin the long run.

I generally recommend against buying links of any kind and encourage people to just learn for themselves how they can create high quality sites and links of their own