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Link Building - A Quick History and Reasoning Lesson

This is the first in a eight part series of knowledge packed articles designed to help you understand and implement the various techniques used in backlink creation. The information provided has been tried and tested and includes proven Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

I will endeavor to show you how to encourage natural backlink growth as well as explaining ways to setup and manage a successful, low cost link building campaign. I will also show you those areas you should avoid and the reasons why.

Many areas will be covered, including the use of ‘link bait’ to increase your Google ranking, the dangers associated with artificial link building, how to avoid the Google backlink over optimization penalty (BLOOD) and exactly why and how links affect your ranking.

Please Note: I will mainly use Google in examples but the methods are basically the same for all search providers.

A Quick History and Reasoning Lesson

Search engines have proven their worth time and time again and the algorithms used have evolved significantly within the last few years. Although content and keyword density still plays an important role in SEO, an increasing emphasis has been put on search spiders to consider ranking pages based on the quantity and quality of their incoming links (known as backlinks).

Because of this evolution you cannot rely solely on the optimization of your content for SEO. In order to gain the best possible search results you must include various methods, the most predominant being link building. Your aim is to create relevant backlinks with unrelated websites that base their content around the same ‘theme’ and search engine marketing strategy as you. In short, you are looking for similar pages with relevant information to boost your search ranking.

One way of explaining the reasoning behind link buildings prominence in search engine rankings is to look at it almost like an online voting system. As you increase your backlinks you increase the number of ‘votes’ in your favor. Any website that has a direct link to yours is effectively saying “I trust this web page and believe it to be relevant”. This approval from other sites helps the search spiders to weed out spam sites and other, just as useless content. The idea is that these ‘bad’ sites will not gain popularity and backlinks from others as their content appears to be of no use or relevance.

The need for substantial links from reputable web pages has encouraged many online vendors and others to find ways to artificially boost the amount of backlinks to their content. This is a must if you wish to compete with others on a level playing field. It is a good idea to consider setting up a link building campaign that will increase your standing in Google and with other search providers. This has to be undertaken with great care and careful management as it can be very easy to create the wrong links in the wrong way. This will attract the attention of search providers and gain you penalties, especially from Google.