We all know how important link building is, link building which also called off-site optimization plays a very important role in a successful optimization campaign, so what is link building exactly? what does a link building campaign usually include? and how should we go about building links, we will try to answer those questions in this article.

What is link building?

Link building refers to the act of acquiring links that point to your website/webpage, there are a number of ways to acquire links, which I will list and try to explain the pros and cons of each method.

a- Building links the natural way!

This happens when a website links to you because the webmaster of that site felt that your website had such good information that he thought linking to it would benefit his visitors, this is probably the best link you could ever get, those are the kind of links that Google in specific and the other search engines look for, links that naturally point to your website, the ideal way for getting those links is quality content, having something useful for your website visitors will always get other webmasters link to you, in the long run at least, which brings us to the cons of this kind of building links, natural link usually take time, they don’t happen in a month or 2, you need to build quality content, and get some people to actually read it! just having good quality content on your website doesn’t guarantee a good exposure and a good amount of natural links, especially if its a new website, you need to bring people to your website to read this content, here are a few methods of doing that:

1- Paid advertising! place a banner on website(s) relating to your topic, or advertise on a newsletter for example.

2- Article submissions, submit the articles on your website to article directories.

3- Press release submission, submit a press release about your new website, a new article or a new interview you did on your website.

4- Submit your website to directories.

5- Join forums and comment on blogs relating to your topic or industry, place your link in your forum sig. and make sure not to spam

Those are some ideas that you can use to get your new website out there, with time, people will notice your website and the content it has, and start gaining natural links.

b- Asking for a link

You can always ask for a link, and it works out perfectly if you know how to do it, here a few tips to follow when asking for a link:

1- Make sure the website your asking for a link on is related to your website, the more benefit your website offers to his visitors the more chances of getting that link.

2- Don’t sound like a robot! lots of spammers use link exchange tools to spam websites asking for links, make sure that your email has a personal touch.

3- Comment on the website, look around the website and see if you can make a suggestion about it in the email, look for a dead link, a broken link, some font inconsistencies and point them out in a nice way in your email, the webmaster will probably appreciate it and give you that link.

4- Explain how your website benefits the visitors of that website, the more relevant and beneficial your website is to his visitors, the more he will be encouraged to place that link.

5- Include your personal contact information, like your phone number or fax number and invite the webmaster to call you if he wants to, he probably wont, but its a nice gesture.

Some might consider those kind of links as natural links, but I feel that since those links were not placed naturally without a request, then they probably should be placed in their own category.

c- Buying links

Buying links is probably the most widely used method for gaining one way back links to your website, allot of websites offer text link advertising on their websites for a monthly or yearly fee, prices range depending on the websites Google Page Rank, popularity and the traffic the website gets, they can start at $5 per month and up to $1000 per month.

There are a number if important notes that you should take care of when buying a link:

1- Make sure the website gives you a direct link pointing to your website without using any JavaScript, or the nofollow attribute.

2- Make sure the website doesn’t link to bad neighborhoods, if you find the website linking to link farms, porn or pill websites your better off without that link.

3- Have a look on the websites that link to the website your considering buying a link on, if most of those links are from link farms for example, then save your and don’t buy that link!

4- Try and get the link on places other than the footer or the links section in the side panel, Google can pick those links up, and usually don’t pass all of the link value to the link placed there.

5- Make sure the webpage your getting a link doesn’t have more than 20 outgoing links on it, the more outgoing links on the page, the less value your link will get.

d- Link exchanges

Link exchanges is an old yet still used method for acquiring back links, link exchanging refers to placing a link to website in return for a link back to your website, search engines such as Google pick up such links and remove them from your link popularity, it is said that link exchanges might even harm your rankings as it is seen by the search engines as a way of "cheating" them, the possibilities of link exchanges damaging your rankings are higher if your exchange links with bad neighborhoods which I have explained earlier.

Other ways of link exchanging has come up such as 3-way link exchanges, where 3 websites (A,B and C) are used in the exchange, website A links website B, and website B links to website C (usually website A and C have the same owner) however, Google can also pick up those links, and in the worst cases, decrease the rankings of the websites involved in 3-way link exchanges.

These are some of the most important link building methods, usually a combination of the 1st 3 methods works out the best.