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SEO link building is one of the most important things you can undertake for your website – without it, you may find that your website is unknown and only visited by direct reference to the site on business cards or when you leave comments on blogs.
Link building of any kind can be a time and cost intensive project, which is why it’s best to get an expert to do it if at all possible – often, they’ll know of shortcuts or more efficient ways to get into the most ‘valuable’ (whether the value is in the high page rank of the other page, or the traffic passing through) places to support your needs.

The basics of SEO link building

SEO link building is based on passing off relative rank of one page to another – almost like voting. The higher the page rank, the more the ‘vote’ is worth – or the more votes that are cast.
Pages with relative page rank will convey similar ‘vote’ levels, but it’s important to remember that search engines constantly change their weighting system, and tries to make it evolve to meet the needs of their readers, so what works today may not work tomorrow.
To get any level of benefit out of back linking, your pages should be absolutely solid in their own SEO – make sure your metatags, descriptions and other issues that create on page conditions are entirely met. There’s no point in linking to a poorly optimised page – so before starting on any link building stratagem, or asking a team to embark on one, you should ensure your site is ready. Once you’ve done that, you’ll get much more value per effort out of your site, and it will allow you to serve your visitors fully.
The most important element of SEO link building is the anchor or link text that you use. This frequently determines how search engine traffic sees you, and what keywords, and anchor text they use on their site.

Not all traffic is alike

Gaining traffic from links, whether it’s PPC, or SEO, personal recommendations and write-ups on trusted sites, or a link from a friend’s blog or site rely on one thing – that people will click through to your site. This represents a measure of trust – more than we’d normally show in real life.
SEO link building is, in many ways, like word of mouth – it relies on your site being recommended by other sites, either of the same or lower rank (lots of), or a less of a higher page rank. Also, like word of mouth, it relies on the people involved being trusted by their visitors – and those people recommending you to them. In many cases, this is the absolute best traffic – they’re already ‘partially’ sold to whatever you’re offering, on the strength of the link from another site – making them more willing to buy into what you’re offering. Another way to get ‘word of mouth’ is to become listed in a search engine.
There’s something almost peculiar about search engines – people believe them almost like recommendations, but don’t become ‘presold’ to anything.

Methods and how to get the most of them

Broadly, there are three methods to get links to your site – providing information that others want to link to, commenting directly on their site, and exchanging links.
Each method is difficult to simply jump into, and will provide different benefits. All three can be time consuming, and stand alone or work well together, depending on what you need to do and how fast you’d like to see results. Most people find that results start to appear fairly quickly – but moving up rankings or seeing increases in traffic frequently come in unevenly spaced increments. There are no quick traffic fixes to get you better SEO or traffic, and it’s important to trust the group, person, or guide you’re working with.

Information people want to link to

It’s relatively easy to find information that people want to link to – you’ll find any knowledge that is unique to you – whether it’s a perspective, new method or information about something that you consider to be ground breaking is probably very valuable to other people. That’s information that you may find people want to look at and share.

1. Information with on page SEO will perform better when people link to them – Google and other search engines value anchor text and on page SEO that match. It’s often very difficult to do without lessons or support.
2. People will link to your site in random ways unless there’s guidance on site. Consider having an information box that tells people how and why to link.

Commenting directly on sites

Commenting on other peoples articles and blogs, and offering meaningful discussion will often provide valuable traffic and gives you direct control over your link text. As you (or an agent acting on your behalf) are the people writing the responses, you can write what you like, and use the linkback text most useful to your site.

1. Remember to offer a comment with substance – if you don’t, people will consider you to be either uneducated, or worse, just won’t visit your site.
2. Some sites have ‘no follow’ instructions on their blogs, meaning that you’re entirely reliant on commenters that visit your site – these are less valuable in terms for pure SEO, but are more valuable for organic and posted links.

Exchanging links

Link exchanges are often the most difficult of projects to arrange – you have to find people to link to, you have to email around, and you have to find a place to put the links you’ve agreed to display in exchange for them displaying yours.

1. In many cases, link exchanges are now becoming meaningless. Search engines are more interested in ‘in context’ links – a great way to get them is to have articles written about the content on site that you want to link to and ask them to do the same.