Link Building – An Important Part of SEO

Sara Beaudoin is the Marketing Communications Manager for SearchPro Systems.

As you may know, link building is a huge part of SEO, and can go a long way in increasing your Google page ranking, as well as traffic to your site(s) and internet user to client/customer conversion rate.  Link building can be simply described as posting a comment on another site and attaching a link to your website with it.  Now a link to your website is on another site, and people can see it and click to view your site, a.k.a. link building.  However, there are shady ways to link build, and there are beneficial ways to link build.

The shady way is to find a random site, post a useless comment on their blog, attach a link to your website, and repeat until you have posted your link on 20 blogs.  The purpose of this is to get the highest number of votes from as many sources as possible in the shortest amount of time as possible.  This type of link building is spamming, and can damage your site’s reputation; therefore, it is not advised by reputable SEO companies.

The beneficial way to link build is to seek out multiple websites that are related to your business by doing a search for relevant keywords and reading their blogs.  Then post a relevant and even helpful comment, rather than just posting your link.  You are basically offering them something in return for placing your link on their website.

You will also be more successful if you use your own keywords as anchor text instead of posting your website’s full link.  People may not click on your website’s link if they can’t tell what type of content they will be redirected to, but if your anchor text explains what the link will lead them to, they will probably be more likely to click.

While link building, it is also important to understand that some sites use a “nofollow” code.  This means that internet spiders that search your page to determine search engine rank, among other things, would not follow the links on the site.  For example, you understand that the more popular a site, the more beneficial it is for you to post your link on that site, so if you own a travel agency, you may want to post your link on Southwest Airline’s website.  However, Southwest Airlines most likely uses a “nofollow” code, so the spiders won’t crawl through Southwest’s website and reach yours through your posted link.  Therefore, your website won’t get a boost in search engine ranking, and your post didn’t help you in regards to SEO the way you hoped it would.

There are however, still benefits to posting on “nofollow” sites, as well as finding some “dofollow” sites to post on.  Stay tuned for more information on link building and the best ways to do so!