What Is Link Building?

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When another site links to your site, there are a number of factors that are important.

As most Websites have more than one page, the specific page on the source site that contains the link to your site is an important factor. The link to your site could be from the home page of the source site, from a main page directly connected to the home page, or from a page buried obscurely deep within the site. Or, the link to your site may come from a "links page" - a page on the site with the sole purpose of housing reciprocal links to other sites.

The specific page that links to your site is important for a couple of reasons. First, the home page of the source site will likely have a greater "PageRank" than an obscure page buried within the site. In the Google search engine algorithm, the "PageRank" of the pages linking to your site affect the PageRank of the target pages on your site. The higher the PageRank of the source site's linking page, the more PageRank value will be added to the target page of the target site.

Similarly, the specific page on your site that the link targets is also an important factor. If all of your in-bound links go to different pages of your site, the resulting PageRank value will be spread out over the pages rather than concentrated on specific pages. It is debatable, but many agree that it is better to have a high PageRank for your home page, than to have lower PageRank values spread out over your site's other pages. There are occasions where the "flow" of the link will be more effective if it is to one of your subordinate pages, but generally you want the links to your home page (or at least your main page for the subject of the link). In any event, the more control you have over the target of the links to your site, the better off you are.

The "Anchor Text" used in the link is also an important factor. "Anchor Text" is the actual text that appears and is highlighted on the source page and clicked on to activate the link to the target page. (It is the text between the 'a href' tag and the closing anchor tag in the HMTL link.)

Your site's SERP Position in most major search engines is increased with respect to a particular keyword when that keyword is included in the anchor text of a link to your site. That is, most search engines index your site under the keywords that are used in the anchor text of links to your site. If most of the links to your site use the same keyword or keyphrase, your site will be have a higher SERP Position for that keyword or keyphrase. Thus, in order to optimize your site for a particular keyword or keyphrase, you want control over the anchor text used in the in-bound links to your site.

Sometimes, of course, the link is from a banner or other graphic. In this case, the "anchor" is not text, but a graphic image which cannot be indexed by the search engines. Basic HTML code provides an "ALT" tag that you can use to add text to a graphic anchor. It is important to have this ALT tag added to the anchor of your in-bound graphic links and for the ALT tag to contain the proper keyword or keyphrase.

Another important factor is the physical placement of the link on the source page. Whether the link is within the content of the source site or displayed as an advertisement in the margin somewhere makes a big difference in the effectiveness of the link in driving direct traffic to your site.

As you can derive from the above discussion, the more control you have over the various factors involved in your in-bound links, the more you will be able to optimize your site. The best way to obtain control is through communication with the webmasters providing your in-bound links. You should request as much input as possible into the creation of the in-bound links to your site. When a Reciprocal Linking service is used, you should look for those services that provide the most control over the linking process.

There are many factors that you should keep in mind while building links to your site. Control over these factors is important to the optimization of your site for your particular keywords or keyphrase.