Internet marketing or search engine marketing that we knew of in the late 1990’s, the time of ‘Internet Explosion’, has undergone a huge change in the last two decades.
Earlier, it mainly consisted of submitting one’s sites to a number of search engines and directories so that their indexing programs, more popularly known as “robots” or “spiders”, can crawl through all of the HTML code of a page and use their individual page ranking algorithms, which were highly confidential, to ascribe a ranking to the page.
This was a fairly simple method and effective too until the emergence of spammers.
However, the loop holes of this system were soon ‘found out’ by the search engines as it was relatively easy for a spammer to get his or her site in the top search displays by using the targeted keyword as many times as possible on the page – in the headings and the text – in the META tags, HTML code, description, marquee and so on.
This was effectively hidden from the browsers by either minimizing the text to unreadable proportions or by simply hiding them with the help of HTML tricks. With search engines lacking the cutting edge technology to identify this kind of spam, such sites invariably got high rankings without providing any valuable information on the subject.
Link building and its impact on the search engine rankings in the past
Nonetheless, with search engines’ ranking algorithms becoming more and more sophisticated by the day, they now tend to take better advantage of external information regarding a site to offer better results as the information contained inside a document can be easily manipulated. This restricts a site with poor quality content from appearing in the top search displays.
One such external factor that has come to acquire considerable significance in engine ranking is link building. Google is seen as the pioneer of this technique as it developed the PageRank algorithm under which the relevance of an inbound link plays an important role in determining the ranking of a site.
The irony here is that every leap in ranking algorithms has been closely followed by new search engine optimization techniques that try to cheat these advanced algorithms.
For instance, the new breed of spammers now buy several domains that link to each other or pay sites with high visibility to include their links in their pages to get higher rankings.
In fact, a number of websites engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sole purpose of cross-linking their sites.
In this quest, they often overlook the quality of links that they are generating and suffer in the long-term due to their indiscretion.
This is because such practice is seen in violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines, which is likely to have an adverse impact on the site’s ranking in search results.
However, this situation can be easily avoided by paying attention to your site’s content and ensuring that it is both useful and unique.
In such a case, your site will soon become popular in the Internet community, thus increasing your chances of getting quality links from various relevant and credible sites.
The fact that links are valuable is widely accepted in the cyber space. However, their value depends largely on the source page from where they come.
Linking and its importance in SEO in present times
Of the three pillars of search engine optimization, namely content, site architecture and links, for some, the last one is the trickiest.
Though we have already established the importance of linking to get a good search engine ranking, the weightage that the search algorithms assign to links has varied from past to present and will be different for future as well.
To make the most of your optimization efforts make sure that the links that you generate are of high quality.
You can employ any of the most popular methods of link generation today – directory submissions, submitting articles to article syndicates, guest posting, RSS Directories, blog carnivals, social bookmarking….
Irrespective of the method that you deploy to secure inbound links for your website, make sure that your link text is interesting, keyword rich and varied.
It is imperative to have good link text as various search engines read this text to determine what your website is all about. Thus, if your site is about hotels, try to have link texts that not only talk about hotels in various destinations but also associated services as well such as package tours, air travel information, bookings and reservations.
The future tense of linking
With the search engines continually striving for more sophisticated algorithm systems to improve their ability to identify and distinguish between quality index pages and those that have been spammed or use black hat optimization techniques, the economics of link building is all set to revolutionize as well.
I believe, in the coming years, links will play an even more critical role in earning the trust, authority and importance required to rank among the top searches.
With techniques such as advanced non-HTML content indexing, XML feeds and clustering already on the table, the face of the Internet and SEO is all geared up for a makeover.
If you do not want your blog site to lag behind in the rat race for better rankings in the next few years, now is the time to revamp your link building campaign. You can either do it yourself or get professional help to infuse a new life into your site.
The next post in this Link Building Campaign series will discuss ‘the ways to get back links’
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Hi Andrew.
i don’t know how you guys does it but link building for me is one though job to do. Most of the time i only sleep, 2 hours a day to make sure all my blog job done according to schedule.
Two hours?! 😮
How in the name of God do you function? I am hopeless unless I have had my full quota of 8 hours sleep! 🙂
2 hours! I would love to know what you achieve in 22 hours of ‘blogging’!
Do you have a daily plan?
Andrew
zezebel, why not you try to be discipline person?
You can make a schedule to make some backlinks to your site.
By the way, for me the Focus is the key to success in Link Building.
Backlinks has got to be the most time-consuming aspect of running a website. Google is definitely getting more strict and low-quality links just don’t cut it anymore. Guest posts seem to be the way to go. The only problem is that most sites don’t like you linking to micro-niche CPA offer sites.
Josiah
Guest posts is a great way to go.
And you are right about the linking back.
I tend to link back to my blog and hope people either opt-in or become loyal readers.
Andrew
There are too many conceptions nowadays regarding link building, and one is that most base their campaigns on quantity. But as an SEO specialist myself, what I believe now that really is effective is to not only ensure your off page campaigns to be ethical but to full-proof the optimization of the site structure as well. I believe that the real equation of site relevancy is 50% on-page and 50% off-page.
There are lots of new methods out there that doesn’t really require massive link building, such as Siloing and link baiting. The site’s contents itself can make progressive moves for its betterment, we just have to make sure we deliver “exceptional” information to let people decide for its real worth. Here are the things which I think that can efficiently boost search engine rankings:
1. well staged internal links (with keywords that vary)
2. high quality backlinks (relevant, dofollow, authoritativeness)
3. body copy (bold, anchor texts, definition or synonyms)
Regards,
Jason
I am somehow disagree with your point. Link building is essential for every website, it is the big part of SEO. Ya I agree that we can not achieve ranking by doing spam work. But if we do the descent link building work google really reward us. There are so many hidden strategy to build link. But the only things is the link building research.
I think Google is putting more and more emphasis on ‘natural’ back linking.
Write a blog post and get others link to it from their blog.
How?
By writing the best tips / advice you can and being different from the rest…not easy…but something we all should strive for.
Andrew
i agree with the make the link interesting part. It shouldn’t just be about getting a link. If we plan things well then we should also get some traffic alongside it.
Backlink is a continue process, if you want to get on the top page of all the major search engines you need to have a good and effective link building plan in place. The most effective and natural way of getting quality backlink is unique and quality contents, but there are other good avenue to get quality and free backlink as well.
Luqman,
Exactly what I said above.
Andrew
Yes indeed, do it yourself, pay for it, beg or borrow, just get it done.
The one thing all webmasters need to understand is, link building is not a “fad”…it was, is, and probably always will be the backbone of Googles algorithm.
Agreed…with a few tweaks here and there on Google’s back link algorithm.
Andrew
Agreed indeed. They will always attempt a step ahead of the foolish (aka black-hatters), but linking as a whole will always be the thing.
I really think that over time, link building is changing, but it is still the most important factor in seo rankings, and getting traffic. I see a trend, at least with my own stats of linking being more about having a social presence on other sites. mass submission of linking is a dying breed (I hope) and it is becoming more critical to have high quality links.
I have a few pages that are ranking highly with only a few dozen links because all the links are on social and high traffic sites. I also get a lot of traffic through those links without SEO rankings as well.
James
I think what you have done proves that quality back linking is the way to go…thanks for sharing.
Andrew
Link building should be done in a way wherein it is a win-win situation for both parties. Even if there are spammers who gets away with their spammy links, these will be seen sooner or later and will be trashed out immediately. Link building should not be treated lightly, as it can make your site be recognized by many people with just one click of your backlink.
Felicia,
“Link building should not be treated lightly”.
Certainly not – bloggers should have a daily task to get great quality back links.
Andrew
Something I haven’t sen asked, surprisingly – is a tweet considered a backlink?
Dennis,
I would class it as a backlink…just a ‘nofollow’ one.
Andrew
Oh right, I forgot the brief hoopla surrounding that back when…