Link building 2013 – a summary

Link building is a strategy used when optimizing your website to search engines (SEO) and to increase the numbers of visitors on your website. Link building is when you get links on other sites than your website, that points to your website. There are two benefits of using link building for your website:

• Creating more links to your website will give your more entrances to your website, and therefore create more visitors for your website.
• Building good links might increase your Google Page rank and lead to a higher place in the search engine result page.

Both of these effects will gain more visitors for your website. So there is no reason, that you shouldn’t use link building.

Google Page rank and links

When you are talking about link building, you should distinguish between good and bad links. To understand this you have to know something about Google Page rank. Google Page rank is a number that Google calculate with a specific algorithm, and that determine the place of your website in the search engine result page.  The reason why Google uses the Page rank, is because they want to give the users of Google the best search result with content of high quality.

The algorithm that is used for calculation of Google Page rank, is very complicated and only Google knows how it is constructed. But there has been a lot of research and guessing on what factors that are a part of the algorithm.

One of the most important factors in the algorithm is in-going links to your website. When you have to understand how these links contribute to Google Page rank, you have to imagine that the Page rank of the site that is linking to you, is divided into peaces corresponding to the number of out-going links on that site. And then each peace is contributing to the Page rank of the site that is linked to, without loss of Page rank on the source site.

If, for instance, a page has page rank 3 and this site links to 3 sites. Then the source sites Page rank is contributing to the 3 destination sites with a part each, that is directly proportional to 1/3 of the source site Page rank of 3.

The conclusion of this is, that if you want to increase your Page rank mostly, you have to get a lot of links from websites with high Page rank and that has few out-going links. It is better to get a link from a Page rank 3 site with few links, than to get a link from a Page rank 10 site with very many links.

When you are doing link building you could therefore distinguish between good and bad links. Good links are from sites with high Page rank and few links and bad links are from sites with low Page rank and many links.

As the picture above illustrates, the source site (SS) is giving some of its Page rank away to each of the destination sites (DS). The part that is giving away is directly proportional to the Page rank of the source site.

Another thing that research seems to have revealed is that the relation between Page rank and the number of in-going links are logarithmic, i.e. it is more difficult to go from a Page rank 9 to 10, than it is going from a Page rank 0 to 1.

You can calculate the Google Page rank of a site using a calculator, i.e. there is one here.

Just like SEO, the link building strategies is changing all the time. That is why I call this article a Link building 2013 review, because link building might not be the same in 2014.

Links from link directories

Link directories are catalogs filled with links. They were very much used in old days, before search robots came. They are still used a little, but today we use search engines that search in indexes, instead of in catalogs.

There are very many link directories out there, but only a few can really be used for link building. The most known and respected link directories are Yahoo and DMOZ. These are link directories that are of very high quality and it is not easy to be included in these directories. Yahoo has a Page rank of 9 and DMOZ has a Page rank of 7.

If you want to use link directories for link building, only use Yahoo, DMOZ and other link directories of very high quality and with a high Page rank, because using the low-quality link directories that are easy to be included in are a wast of time.

Not many people uses link directories any more, so using these for link building will only benefit to your Page rank, not so much to a directly increase in number of visitors.

Forum posts 

Forum posts can be a good way to do link building, but it really don’t give very much to your Page rank, because a forum has many outgoing links.

Forum posts might not give so much to your Page rank, but in many cases, if you write some good posts that attract visitors, this will directly lead to more visitors.

Blog comments

You can also comment on blog posts when you do link building. This way of link building is like forum posts often not something that benefits your Page rank very much, but can give you visitors.

Guest blogging

You can write an article to a guest blog, to do link building. This is a good idea, because you can place a link to your website and in that way both contribute to your Page rank and get visitors.

Go for the guest blogs that has a high page rank, are well respected in the area your write in and that has a high quality of content. If you do this, it will be a very effective way to gain more visitors to your websites.

Social networks

You can market your articles on social sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious. Many people uses social networks so this can give you a lot of visitors that are very targeted to your site.

Using social networks to market your site will become more and more important, so this is definitely something you should do. Especially Google+ should be the social network you focus on, because it can affect your Author rank and we are expecting that Author rank will be a factor in the place of your website in the search engine result page in the future.

Press releases

You can make press releases about your products or other news about your site. These can be done on different Press release sites, i.e. eCommWire. This can also get a link to your site and give more visitors.

Mobile apps

Mobile apps for smartphones and tablets are very popular, so an effective way to get more visitors is to develop an app for your site or to get a link or ad for your site in another app.

Broken link building

A very effective way to do link building is to find broken links, i.e. links that does not exist any more and therefore gives a 404 error – page not found. Then you can write to the owner of the site and tell that you have found a broken link, but that he can replace the link with a link to your site. In this way you can overtake an old, broken link.

Giveaways

Giveaways is when you offer your visitors something good for free. This could be a free gift or a free e-book they can download. Free things always attract people. This is also a very effective way of link building.

The golden rule in link building

The golden rule in link building is: The harder you have to work for your link, the more worth it is.

This was just a few of the channels you can use, if you want to start link building your articles. There are many more ways to do link building, and if you have an idea to a channel you can do link building, please share this in the comments.