If you want to rank high in the real world, you need people who say that you are good. On the Internet, if you want to rank high in search engines, you also need “votes”, just like in the real world. You need people to say that you are good. If you have enough people saying that you are good, the search engines will rank you higher. This is where backlinks come in. Backlinks are like votes, they tell the search engines that you are good. The more “votes” or, backlinks you get, the better you will rank in the search engines.

Also, many people think that all links were equal. This is not always true. There are some sites that are, in the eyes of the search engines more important or respected. Just like in the real world, if the President said that you were good, people would value that much more than if a hobo said that you are good. A good way to see how important or respected a site is in the eyes of the search engines is by looking at their Google Page Rank. This is a scale from 0 to 10 telling you how important a site is. Google is 10 and Facebook are Page Rank 10, other sites like Wikipedia, MySpace and Adobe are Page Rank 9 and so it goes.

The more links you get from high Page Rank sites, the higher your chances of good search engine rankings are.

The easiest way to get a lot of valuable backlinks is to hire a link building service. They can get you the links you need. Also, they will know where to find the high Page Rank websites where they can get backlinks that will help you rank better.

Here is what Google says about paid links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank can dilute the quality of search results. If you believe a site is engaged in buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please tell us about it. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Google even has a form to report paid links that were bought or rented in order to get PageRank.

Now building lings or hiring a link building service is a different story. You can build as many links as you want and it is completely fine with Google, as long as you follow their webmaster guidelines. The truth of the matter is, that Google actually encourages you to build a better web site that is more user friendly and to build more pages and to publish articles and so build more links.

Building links, like building web sites and adding content is mainly a lot of work. You can reduce your work load by hiring a link building service. But make sure that the link building company that you hire knows what they are doing and that they know the rules and follow them.

To state it a little different: To buy backlinks is completely fine, if you consider hiring a link building service as your means of buying links. To buy links or buy .edu backlinks by renting links on other web sites is very risky business and should not be done. One report from your competition and you will see all your rankings tumble.

Contextual link building is one of the newest ways of promoting your website. It is done by placing links in the content in such a way that a reader is enticed to click on it. This can be done by submitting articles on article submission websites.

All you need to do is write interesting and unique articles that can be about 300 to 500 words and submit them on famous article directories such as ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com. The article should also have a catchy title such as ‘How to lose weight in 2 weeks in a healthy way’. The more interesting the title you have for your article, the better will be the chances of it being read.

In such article directories, there is a section called author box or resource box that is usually found at the end of the article. You need to place a call-to-action sentence in this area with a hyperlink to your website such as ‘To know more about how you can lose weight in 2 weeks, click here’. You can hyperlink the words ‘click here’ so that people who want to know more can click on it and visit your site.

Make sure you make use of keywords in your article and free of grammatical errors. The article should start with an interesting title and proceed with even more interesting article and then at the end of the article, the reader should feel the urge to read by clicking on the provided link. Also make sure you have an attractive and informative website that can meet the reader’s requirements.

Even if you have a website with good content, your business may fail miserably if you do not promote it well. So, we can understand promotion is the key to successful online business. A very good way to promote your business is through building links.

By means of link building, you can help bring more people to visit your website through various sources such as article directories, web directories, social networking websites, forums, blogs, link exchanging, etc. The whole process of link building can be time consuming for you if you have a busy schedule. Hence, you need to rely upon experts to popularize your site via link building.

There are plenty of SEO companies that specialize in link building. When you seek assistance from a SEO firm for link building, you will be provided with a detailed link building campaign. SEO companies will make every effort to bring more visitors to your site through high quality links and increase your website’s visibility on search engines.

Through extensive link building, you can make sure that your business outperforms others when visitors search for key phrases and keywords associated to your business.

photo credit: Jesse Gardner

The search engine rates the websites after taking into consideration various parameters. The links that are pointing to a particular website play a very important role in the ranking of the website. The search engine likes the websites with many incoming links. But here you will have to understand that the quality and the relevance of the incoming links are very important. You cannot ignore the quality. You cannot ignore the quantity as well. You can’t sit satisfied having a few quality links. You will also have to work on the quantity at the same time.

Remember that link building alone cannot do miracles for you. You will have to make sure that you are taking care of all other relevant things as well. It includes the content of the website and the design of the page as well. You will also have to optimize the Meta tags (actually only the description meta tag). If you are taking your eyes off these things, then your link building campaign will not work well for you. If the content on your website is not relevant and has poor quality, then your links, no matter how high the quality and quantity is, are not going to do any miracles for you. So make sure that you have a decent or better excellent and user friendly website and you are paying attention to the content.

Again another thing of importance which is generally ignored by new comers is the relevance of the website from which the website is linked. Remember that the relevant websites are the ones which will help you attain the high ranking and not the irrelevant websites. You will also have to understand the method of linking. If you are using text links then you will need to use your keywords as the anchor text. Whereas when images are linked, you will have to make sure that you have provided an alternative text link as well. This is also true for flash content and for videos.

These are some important aspects for your link building. The rest is hard work and persistence. As in real life: You create your own future.

Link Building as a Search Engine Optimization Tool by Hans Peter Jeschke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tool, the TouchGraph Google Browser

You can use this free Java application to explore the connections between related websites and quickly find relations that were not obvious before.

Here is an example:

Touchgraph Results for Keyword "link building"

You can see the TouchGraph results for the keyword “link building”, which happens to be one of the keywords that I want to rank for, and which happens to have a lot of competition. The Touch Graph application revealed to me that several of the results that appear on page 1 in Google have a link from a certain page on searchenginewatch.com.

I quickly headed over to that page and left a comment there. Bingo, one step forward regard my link building campaign.