Link building: One/Two Way & Link Swapping

The nature of link building is constantly changing. A good portion of the work on a campaign is devoted to Link Building on a monthly basis as link building is one of the main factors of ranking in the search engines. Good quality authoritative links are needed to help with a websites. So I thought I would provide some information on link building to help you understand the process a little better.

Link popularity refers to the number and quality of links pointing to your website. Having other authoritative websites link to your website tells the search engines that they consider your website important, and thus helps increase your popularity.

There are many tactics for gaining incoming links for a website. It is imperative for the long term success of your site that links are gained according to Google’s Guidelines.

Search engines use links they find out website to discover new pages and websites. This is why you generally don’t need to actually submit your site to a search engine. The search engines will find your site via other sites that link to it. The other important aspect of links is that search engines use these links to help gauge how a page should rank in the search engines. Please note that with Google, there are over 200 ranking factors, and links are only a portion. But nevertheless an important aspect.

Search engines prefer websites that have links from authoritative websites in a similar industry/focus. Links from authoritative websites helps with a websites visibility and gaining incoming links helps with its search engine rankings.

Now, directories have taken a hit with Google in some of the recent Algorithm updates. This doesn’t mean all directories are bad, but what it means is that finding the right sites or directories for your particular industry is essential.

Free Directory Submissions

With the free directories, much of these are volunteer based, and as a result, it can take months with some just to get listed. When a link building campaign begins using free directory submissions, there is a delay or ripple effect of waiting for the directories to list the website and then get credit for the new link. So you can essentially see there is a ripple effect with the free directory submissions with a link building campaign, and patience is often needed as well.

Paid Directory Submissions

With paid directory submissions, for a certain price, the directory will review your submission in much quicker, usually within a few days. There are many quality paid directories for websites to be listed, and these days it helps to set aside a portion of your marketing budget for these. Some are a one time fee, and others are a recurring yearly fee.
Types of links (One way, Two way and Swapping Links)

With both Free and Paid directories, these are often one way links, from the directory to website. These are generally the types of links that we aim to gain as one way links tend to be more valuable than swapping links with other websites.

Swapping Links

Swapping links (two way links) are becoming less valuable for websites when it comes to ranking higher. This is not an avenue that you want to place a major focus, such as link exchanges in the past. The search engines are easily able to detect websites that swap links, and these links can be discounted to a certain extent so they are not as valuable as compared to one way links. As always, this doesn’t not mean that you can’t exchange links. If it will help your website users, to be beneficial in some manner, then it would be Ok to implement. To use for ranking purposes only, I would advise against.

Another way that some websites look to exchange links is using the triangle effect where the linking pattern is more of a triangle or circle. These are also very easy for the search engines to detect as well.

This is not to say that reciprocal links are bad, but you should be selective on the links/pages/websites that you exchange with. They should be within a similar industry/focus as yours. Link to the website if you feel they are a good resource for your own visitors, and link with websites that can potentially send traffic your way.

With one way links being more valuable than two way (reciprocal links) for a website, generally it’s better to devote more time to towards the one way links for websites.

A Few Other Link Building Options

From there, there are many upon many creative ways for attracting links for your site. Creating great unique content is a good way to naturally attract links. Link Bait is another option, Link bait is designed purposely to acquire attention or persuade others to link to the website. Link bait can be an tremendously powerful form of marketing. The term often has a negative connotation. The content for link baiting could be a text, image, audio or video clip and is appealing enough to catch the people’s awareness.

Providing Original Research is another great way to attract links. While this may take a bit more time, when done properly, it can be very beneficial. How to Tutorials and Videos are other effective ways, along with embracing Social Media avenues to reach out to your community. The list can go on and on and on…