Link building basics

What is the big deal with link building and search engines?

First of all search engines follow links on your web pages. Say for example you submit your index.html page to a major search engine. If it gets indexed then it will follow your other links (pages) from the navigation structure.

Keywords in your links is another important thing that search engines look at. If your website is about shoes and you have it in your links then search engines will know your site is about shoes. Remember this is just one aspect of the big picture, but keywords in links plays a role.

Links pointing from other sites (preferably related sites) will count as a vote for your site. Just like in politics... the more votes you get the more popular you will become. The end of the day the polititian that get the most votes will be in power. In the search engine landscape authority sites is important. However, nowadays people try to trick the search engines, buy links etc. The result from thes is, search engines look not the quantity of links but rather the quality. There are many stories on the net of companies that bought thousands of competitive keyword links and pointed it to their sites. Unfortunately these type of practice only result in a drop in ranking in the SERPs.

You get two types of links:

1. inbound links
2. outbound

Inbound links are basically links in your website navigation structure. Your web pages pointing to one another internally in your website.

Outbound links are when you create a link to another website. blog etc. You point to an external page.

How do you build links?

There are numerous ways of doing this. I will mention a couple of ways from experience:

- Ask family and friends to link to your website
- Join forums and talk about your favorite topic and add your website in your sig file
- Create a lens on Squidoo and talk about your favorite topic
- Swap links with related websites
- E-mail webmasters and ask them to swap with you
- Use newsletters
- Do a public announcement (launch of site)
- Buy links (SE know about this - not recommended)
- Submit your site to high traffic directories e.g. Yahoo, DMOZ etc.
- Social bookmarking - (stumbleupon, technorati, deliscious, furl) etc.
- Make use of Myspace, Facebook etc.
....

Hope this gave you a brief intro in link building

Good Post...Is reciprocal linking...or link exchange still the best form of link building?

nice tips .thanks

I would say natural links is the best. People that go visit your site. Like what they read. Link themselves to your site.

This way is the best.

Search engines are becoming more complex by the day and their algoritms is becoming more clever.

Take any free offer you get ! Not to spam this thread! But I was at a hosting forum, and the post "How to get clients"...I said here's a website to post your ads on..Free!...one guy from the forum post to my site. I have 12 sites and spend 3 hrs a day in promotion.

Directories submission(manualy) is must to rise ur pr value of site.
After that u can make your link exchange, Article submission, blog posting, etc....

what is the best free directories ?

Free best directoires :A particular group of directories(having high PR) that provide you free links(one way) and every links of that directories must provide good values to your site.

nice post..
thanks