Link Building for SEO
If you have a website that contains information that is of interest to other people you may be able to find sites that are willing to link to you. Sometimes they will ask for a reciprocal link and while this is OK it's better if you can convince them to give you a one way link.
Some sites with a high PageRank charge for inbound links. The value of these remains questionable since Google frowns on this practise and it will down rank these websites if they are discovered. Also, the only way of measuring PageRank is by checking it on the Google Toolbar, which is only an indicator as opposed to a real value. Google only updates this two or three times a year meaning that the PR value displayed on the toolbar is often well out of date.
Link Building - Finding Links
You can find suitable sites to link to you by searching for your keywords and finding sites that are related to what you do but not in direct competition. If you think that their visitors may benefit from the information that is on your site they may be willing to provide a link to you.
If you are a member of a professional institute or association you may also find that they will provide a link to their members’ websites from their own membership directories.
LInk Building - The Competition
Another way of building links is to check what inbound links your competitions' websites are getting. Google provides a way of checking this using their "Link:" operator. This displays a list of pages that link to the page you are referencing. To use this enter it into the Google search box as shown below.
Best Link Building Methods
By far the best way of building or developing inbound links is to ensure that your website contains lots of interesting and unique content.
Websites that are interesting will attract links without too much effort in this direction. People will link to your website if they think that the content is interesting enough to share with their own website visitors.
Link: Operator Examples: This example checks inbound links to the BBC website link:www.bbc.co.uk and this one is for links to the BBC website sports section, link:www.bbc.co.uk/sport.
It is important to note that Google (for whatever reason) does not provide accurate results through many of its search operators.
Better link checks are available using Microsoft's Bing Search Engine. For example the BBC link above reports under 9,000 link results. Bing reports almost 48 million. Here's Bing's link check, link:www.bbc.co.uk.
Google does provide much more accurate results if you have a Webmaster tools account (of which more later).
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