Link building is the process of requesting, creating and encouraging links, from various sources, to your website. Links help with search engine optimisation and driving traffic.
Link building is the key form of 'Off Site SEO,' that is Search Engine Optimisation done off your website to increase your rankings in the search engines. In the world wed web, search engines consider links to a website as 'votes' for that website by the one linking to them. There is a consensus that these link votes are one of the most important factors for ranking well in search engines.
Aside from SEO, more links means there are more ways for people to get to your website so it should result in more traffic.
There are three ways to get links, according to Seomoz.org:
- Editorial Accumulation- acquiring links naturally by another webmaster simply deciding to link to you.
- Manual Suggestion and Approval- such as submitting to directories and manually requesting other website and blogs to link to you
- Self Created, Non-editorial- links that you create yourself, not on your own site. This includes blog comments, links posted in forums and guestbook signing.
Web Site Advantage has some great tips and info about link building.
Hi Nick,
An under-utilised source of links are RSS feeds. Although they sounds a bit 'geek' they are quite easily generated/accessed in blogs. There are also some tools that generate RSS feeds from a flat HTML websites as well eg http://www.feedage.com/html2rss/
Thanks for the tip Peter. Do you mean you submit your RSS feed to various websites and therefore they are linking back to you?