Link Building or Back Linking, play a very crucial role in Search Engine Marketing campaigns. Most of the online population today uses Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. And these search engines determine your websites page rank, lets say, taking into consideration the inbound and outbound links associated with your website.
Consider a link to be more of a vote. The more the links, the higher the chances of your website or webpage having a good page rank on these search engines, and the higher of more users visiting your website.
This article mostly describes one way link building strategies, there are many ways to build links or create back links or track backs.
Lets start with the basics; “Links” are used for navigational purposes throughout the online world. A link, can take you from one webpage to another. There are fundamentally two types of links. The first type, internal links, are used for navigating, to and fro, within the same website. The second type of links – external links, are used for navigating from a webpage on one website to a webpage on another website. Thus, another website linking ‘back’ to your website is termed as back-linking.
Four different types of links exist; these include –
- Dynamic Links: Mostly these type of links are created using various scripting languages such as JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, etc.
- URL Links: URL links are those that point to a websites home page or index page, it might be pointing towards your own website or some other website.
- Text Links or Static Links: Most common of all links. Usually seen as keywords or keyword phrases and critically used for Search Engine Optimization and link building
- Image Links: Images, that usually link to one webpage or another.
When Link Building, you must be able to recognize and identify the types of links used by you or/and your competitors, you don’t need to learn web programming or HTML, you just need to identify these.
Links, not just provide navigation for your users, but also for search engine bots or spiders or crawlers. Search Engine robots, bots, spiders or crawlers are nothing but program snippets that visits websites all over the internet and gather information about these websites. Based on this information your website is ranked in search engines. If no links exists to and from your webpage or website, how will these search engine programs can know that your website exists, let alone users or visitors?
The process of gathering information by these search engine programs or spiders is usually known as ‘indexing’. Once indexed, your website then turns up in search engines, depending on the information gathered from your website.
There two types of links that your website must have, in order to get indexed better. These include one way links and reciprocal links. One way links are those when other websites link back to yours, without your website linking back to them and Reciprocal links are those where your website links to others and those others link back to yours.
One way links are the ones that hold more weight age, where search engines are concerned. So, the more the number of websites linking your website, the better the chances of your websites having a better page rank.