It is now common knowledge, at least among online marketers and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists, that the success of a SEO campaign is dependent to a great extent on the success of link building efforts. Greater the number of links from high-quality, relevant websites, greater the chances of a website getting ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.

However, this fact is lost upon a high number of website owners, particularly small to medium sized enterprises. Recently, we were extremely surprised that one of our SEO prospects in Singapore had zero link popularity several years after the website had gone live. So, there is undoubtedly a need to educate clients and prospects on the basics of link building and why achieving a good link popularity is an important tactical step in online marketing/ SEO.

When undertaking a link building project, there are three criteria to be borne in mind:

• Quantity of links: More the number of links, the better it is
• Quality of links: Better the quality of pages and websites from which the links are obtained, greater the weightage of those links to the overall link popularity of a site
• Relevance of links: Greater the relevance of the sites from which the inbound links are obtained, better the results will be with the overall off-site SEO efforts.

Focus the link building campaign on the above three aspects to achieve optimum results.

How to embark on a link building campaign

The key to building high organic search engine rankings is to ensure that the search engines view the site to be ‘naturally’ relevant to its target users. Therefore, all efforts in the various aspects of SEO, including boosting link popularity, should take into consideration the need to make them seem natural.

Broadly, we consider two approaches to building links—the one-to-many approach and the one-to-one approach.

The one-to-many approach to link building helps create visibility for a website quickly. In this approach, we disseminate information about a site through various legitimate distribution/ syndication channels, for example, press release distribution services (http://www.ontarget-media.com/marketing_services/press-release-writing-distribution.htm), article marketing or suitable viral marketing techniques (we will cover each of these techniques separately). Not only do many of these sources provide a website with the much sought-after inbound links from multiple sources, they can contribute to direct growth in traffic to a website.

In the one-to-one approach, the link building specialist identifies niche websites that could be potential link partners to pitch their own websites. To reiterate, the criteria used in the selection of link partners are: quality of the site (how good is the content?) and relevance to the theme of the site to which a link is being sought. Very often, the Google Page Rank of a web page is considered as an indicator of how valuable a link from that particular page will be. It is certainly not the only factor that should be considered, though it’s good to bear that in mind.

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