Link Building

Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links from external web sites to your own to improve both direct referrals ie. people clicking on the links and search engine ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.

Web site Crawler will go to a site again and again whose ranking in Search Engine is high. You can verify this fact by putting your site on a high rank site. If your site link is available on a high rank web site then you have 99.99% chances that you site will be indexed with-in 24Hrs.

How to increase Link Popularity ?

There are various ways of increasing your web site link popularity. I'm listing out some important tips which are easily doable.

• Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Don't go for automated submission.
• Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories will give your site a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
• Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to your site if you have what they want and no where is available.
• Leverage your personal relationsrelations with other webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
• Participate in Link Exchange Program. Find top 20 sites doing the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the Search Engine.
• If you are subscribed in a forum and forum does not have any restriction to keep your site link as your signature then it can help you to increase your site popularity.
• Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG, and Slashdot etc. Before submitting please go through their spam policy.
• Write good articles in blogging sites and give few references of your links with-in that article.
• Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, news letters, blogs etc.

There are other ways but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternative.

• Buy a place on high rank website where you can put your link.
• Subscribe for google's Adwords program to drive traffic towards your site.
• You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the number of hits on your site which will result in your site link popularity.

What are Backlinks?

In layman's terms, there are two types of links: inbound and outbound. Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while inbound links or backlinks, come from an external site to yours. e.g. if cnn.com links to yourdomain.com, the link from cnn.com is a backlink (inbound) for yourdomain.com, however the link is an outbound link from cnn.com's perspective. Backlinks are among the main building blocks to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Why Backlinks Are Important

• The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines like Google, give more credit to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.
• Therefore, when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they not only consider the number of backlinks to that site but also their quality. 
• In order to determine the quality, a search engine considers the content of the sites.
• For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to do oracle tuning, and received a backlink from another website about oracle tuning, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing.
• Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. 
• While it is fairly easy to modify your webpages to make them more SEO friendly it is a lot harder for you to influence other websites and get them to link to your website. This is the reason search engines regard backlinks as a very important factor. 
• When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the most powerful resources a webmaster has.
• Backlinks from multiple websites with the anchor text "oracle tuning" would help your website rank higher for the keyword "oracle tuning". 
• Using your keyword is a superior way to utilize a hyperlink as against having links with words like "click here" which do not relate to your website.

Backlinks building tools

Backlink Builder

Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer

Getting Listed in Direcories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ,Yahoo and Jasmin directory is a must, not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

RSS Feeds

You can offer RSS feeds to interested sites for free, when the other site publishes your RSS feed you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites that publish news announcements and press releases for free or for a small fee . A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

• Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings. 
• In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant backlinks were ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.
• There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple.
• Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. 
• Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.
• One thing is certain, interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. 
• In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.