When trying to rank your website or blog in the various search engines a fair bit of your efforts will go toward building links to your site using the various keywords and anchor text you happen to be trying to rank for. There are three primary you can do this.
Passive Link Building
I better throw this one into the mix as well, despite it being a less active technique. You can choose to let your content speak for itself and hope that generous webmasters will come across your work and then choose to link to it all by themselves. While you will get a few links this way it shouldn’t be relied on to move your rankings upward, because unless sites like Mashable, Techcrunch, or the Huffington Post choose to give you some link love you probably won’t notice much of a difference.
This method should probably be seen as a bonus system of links. The best way to entice other bloggers or webmasters to link to you is to write truly “pillar” content that simply isn’t available anywhere else. When you consider that an authority site could easily charge (and get) several hundred dollars a month for a relevant link you soon see the merit in taking the time to do the job properly, and write some amazing content.
Automated Link Building
There are of tools, programs, or services available to you that can quickly generate a massive amount of links to your website, but unless you use them sparingly and appropriately they can end up doing you more harm than good. It’s relatively easy for someone like Google to spot the patterns that are inherent with these systems and apply a penalty to your site which will effectively “null and void” most of the link building work you’ve done.
In severe instances Google can even choose to de-index your site from their results all together leaving you in the unenviable position of trying to replace any and all traffic they would have been sending you.
Manual Link Building
Manual link building is by far the most time consuming method, but it’s also the method that gives you the most control over where and how your links are placed. There truly is an art to link building, and it’s a skill that’s important to have if you’re planning on being online for some time.
The important thing to remember is that the links you build today will continue to pay off for years to come. A link on a brand new site today could turn into a PR 5 link if the webmaster of that site puts enough work into it over the coming years. When you consider that the same is true of all the hundreds or thousands of links you build you truly get a sense of that value of manually building these links.
A truly ambition blogger will even take it to the next level by building links to that other persons website in order to improve the rankings of the page his or her link is on. Guest posting is one of the most effective ways of getting a link from a website you admire and you should always make a point of not only responding to any and all comments the article generates, or sharing the content within your social network, but also building backlinks to the article itself so that the link coming from it becomes ten times more valuable to your site.
Whichever method you adopt as your favorite you shouldn’t discount any other out of hand. It’s always a good idea to incorporate a mixture of diverse links into your link building campaigns.
Another important aspect of link building should be recording, by recording the date, location, contact information, anchor text, and link authority (PageRank) you can quickly check on your links to see how they are doing, and whether or not they are still in place.
Link building is an ongoing process that should be continued for the life of your website. Over time as your own authority and PageRank improve the value of your site will also continue to increase, and the potential earnings will improve. A 125×125 banner ad on a PR2 website might bring in $20, or $30 dollars monthly, but the same 125×125 banner on a PR7 site will fetch closer to ten times that amount.












