There’s just no getting around it, if you want to improve your search engine page ranking then link building is a key element of the way forward. Google and the like place considerable emphasis on well-placed, relevant links to and from the pages of your site and many web editors will only get so far with their site with regards to SEO, without building these links.

A quality link is one that comes from a page which is relevant to your own and has already been indexed or, if a new page, is positioned in such as way as to ensure that it will be indexed within a reasonable time frame.

One Way Links
There are a number of different linking strategies and techniques that have varying degrees of success. One-way backlinks are the most highly prized. These are links that are from external sites to pages within your own site. These links are powerful because, in short, they tell the search engines that your website is interesting, valuable or useful to users of the site linking to you. They are also great for garnering direct traffic to your site as a result. As you can imagine, attracting one-way links is harder than some of the other strategies covered below and yet should be an element of any decent linking strategy.

Farewell Article Sites
In the good old days (up until some time during 2006), article sites and directories were a great way of creating these one way links. For article sites, you created (or outsourced the creation of) some content, provided it to the article site and saw it published with an ‘author bio’ at the bottom containing your desired link. These days, however, all but a few of the article sites have been penalised for allowing the publishing of low rent off-shore content and – worse – duplicate content which as we all know is a search engine no-no. Of those remaining, many now charge a review fee in order to fund staff hand checking content before publishing it. This may be a useful addition for some harder-to-link sites but for most will seem like a lot of effort and expense for what may be an ever decreasing return.

Bon Voyage Directories
Similarly, directories were a time-honoured way of achieving one-way inbound links. They too have suffered over the last couple of years with the search engines recognising that the barrier to entry to achieving a directory link is minimal and thus its value must, by definition, be fairly low. A few remain, notably some sector-specific directories that may still convey a reasonable degree of “link juice” but these are the exception rather than the rule.

Motivation Through Exchange of Value
So, short of asking 10,000 people to link to you with nothing in return save the addition of a relevant link on their site (actually helpful to the search engines but not enough to motivate anyone), to get one-way links you need to examine more creative means by which to motivate other webmasters. Since any form of linking should be a fair exchange of value, there are a couple of effective methods of reeling other sites in. You could offer to create content for a their site, for example. This is great for your reputation too because the other site can promote you as an expert, or authority, on a certain subject as well as becoming a link partner. And if you do have a certain area of expertise you could offer e-books and advice services to consumers and promote these on relevant external sites. This mechanism is proving to be effective although time consuming for a good many linking campaigns.

As an alternative, you could even offer some level of commission for each click-through or sale made as a result of the link. This tends to be easier for merchants than for affiliates and requires the ability to track and commission traffic via NATURAL links rather than the mainstream affiliate tracking URLs most of us know and love (!). There is no point in providing content with your affiliate URL in it – the other party will probably happily publish it but you will gain no SEO benefit from the presence of an affiliate tracking URL on their site.

There are no doubt other creative alternatives including content exchange – both parties write for the other and include a link; providing your partners with access to some form of useful tool or widget not available in the public domain; offering the partner’s membership some kind of discount (again requires accurate tracking); the provision of some kind of service or favour in return. In short anything other than paying hard cash for links which is an ABSOLUTE NO-NO. There are many firms out there who actively report anyone found doing this to Matt Cutts et. al at Google and in many cases sites participating in such paid linking schemes suffer. Rapidly and permanently.

Reciprocal Linking
Moving onto other forms of link exchange, reciprocal links are simply a case of trading links with another site. This has historically been the most prevalent form of link exchange. Unlike one-way links, reciprocal links are normally more “staged” and set-up. One site will simply contact another and ask to have reciprocal links. This is why many argue that Google no longer rewards these with the same authority ranking as the direct one-way links which have been set up purely on the merit of the linked-to site. That’s not to say that reciprocal links aren’t successful or useful PROVIDED THAT they are on-theme and that links are only traded with partners of similar / reasonable quality. Anyone running a reciprocal campaign needs to remember that exchange of value also applies here. Partners tend to want to trade with sites and pages that have similar visible ranking (including the dreaded Google Page Rank . . don’t get me on that one!) and reasonable visibility in the search engine results. Great for established sites. Chicken and egg for newcomers. That said, if your site is content-rich and of good quality, many more savvy webmasters will recognise that you should achieve reasonable rankings over time and are therefore worth partnering with.

Outbound Linking
Most people ignore outbound links when planning a linking campaign, with the exception of those links reciprocated with partners. In fact Google and other search engines value outbound links when determining the theme and relevance of your site and links to “authority” sites in your space are actually a good thing, even though they are unlikely ever to be returned.

Three Way Linking
Three-way partner links are usually used by a site which sits in a group of sites or has complimentary themed siblings. So, for example if your main site has a relevant sister site, the sister site will link to a partner site and this partner site will then link back to the main site. Some partners can also link this way even if you have only one site, with you linking to their site A and them returning a link from their site B. Although many regard three way linking with some suspicion and, as usual, there is a lot of mythology on the forums about its viability, it can be a useful element of a linking campaign in creating a one-way link which doesn’t appear exactly like a reciprocal one.

With three way linking it is particularly important to pay attention to your incoming links as a result of the transaction – they must still be of good quality. Search engines are keenly aware that some sites use spam and other methods to boost their inbound links and these can damage your sites ranking and reputation. Owners of networks of sites are without doubt more prone to use questionable and potentially dangerous tactics. In all cases, incoming links should be relevant to your site, use appropriate keywords in the anchor tags and ideally already have good presence in search engine indexes. We’ll cover some of the trickery employed by unscrupulous webmasters in another article very soon.

Natural Link Structure
Finally, the search engines look for a “natural” link structure. They want to see a mixture of outbound-only, inbound-only and reciprocal links to and from your site. This is the kind of structure that occurs naturally over time and any attempt you make to accelerate that, whilst perfectly acceptable provided that you follow the rules, should emulate a natural structure.

Good and ultimately successful link-building takes time and a great deal of effort but the rewards you can get from Google and other search engines will be worth it in the long run. Just remember to focus on the value that you are able to offer to partners and utilise to the full.

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