Importance of Building Quality Links

All the content in the world will not rank your website if you don’t have quality back links pointing to your site. Building back links and staying afloat of competition is an on-going effort. Generally sites in the top 10 for competitive terms will have thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands of links pointing to their site.

Links that best help your site would be .edu, .org, and .gov if you can find them. Factors to consider in persuing a link on someone’s site is the age of the domain, links pointing to their site, and the Google PageRank to get a rough idea of a sites ranking power. You should also make sure that the link to your site is not ‘no follow’ which will kill any kind of promotion power you may have gotten.

Types of Links

Organic Links: “natural” links that are created thanks to your quality content. Organic links are created by users who enjoy your site and do the work for you by posting your link on forums, sites, and sharing with their friends.

One-Way Links : generally purchased, these links are from one site pointing to another. These include paid listings on websites, and directory submissions. One-way links are the largest carrier of ranking power from one website to your website. Some good one-way links can be obtained through relevant-site press releases.

Reciprocal Links : exchanging links is unfortunately a dying practice. There was a time when you were encouraged to exchange links with someone, creating a reciprocal link. Reciprocal linking now a days is best left to relevant websites. The days of exchanging links on your links page have come and gone. A good amount of bloggers will create profiles on sites like Facebook and Myspace, and link between their site and profiles.

Three-Way Links : so say you want the benefits of a one-way link, with the practice of a reciprocal link. You may consider a three-way linking set up, where the owner of site A would link to site B. In exchange, the owner of site B would link to another site of site A owners’. These aren’t detected by search engines as connected if done right.

For getting first page search results consider submitting to the Google DMOZ directory. DMOZ is an aggregater for many other directories, providing the listings they will use which will further promote your site without any additional work.