Your site authority depends on the quality and relevance of all the sites that link to you. The higher your site authority, the better you rank on the search engines. Ranking on the front page of the search engines means that you will get targeted site visitors that are already looking to buy your product or service.

What is Link Building?

Link building is aquiring relevant high quality links back to your website. There are many ways to do this and some include:

• banner exchanges
• webrings
• directory listings
• social media links (like Facebook)
• reciprocal links – a site links to you, you link back to them

3-5 years ago it was quite popular to have graphical banners to link to other sites. And everyone belonged to some kind of webring. However, previously common link building techniques like banner exchanges and webrings are no longer effective in today’s times. Banner ads tend to give a site visitor “banner blindness”, so while your banner may be pretty and it may be fun to share with other sites, don’t count solely on banner ads to bring site visitors.

Search engines index millions of web pages across the globe on a daily basis. They are looking for updated and new content, that is their job. But another main function of the search engines is to decide which site or which page is most relevant for keywords a person enters into their search box. How they do that is a highly guarded secret and the algorithms of search engines highly speculated by SEO’s around the world. But there are a few things we know for sure that search engines value on a web site – and one of the most important things is how sites link to other sites. The more relevant the link, the better the search engines will “like” the site.

What are relevant links?

What do I mean by relevant links? Well, a site’s content depicts what that site is about. So, a site about paper clips and a site about pizza would be about two completely different things. If the paper clip site linked to the pizza site, the search engines will say “hmm, these two sites are not related at all” and it will not count the link as relevant. The link will have very little value in this case.

However, if the two sites are on the same topics or are very similar, the search engines will value the links as being relevant. And this is what the search engines want to see. The more relevant links that go to your site from sites that are similar, the more authority your site gains in the search engine’s eyes.

Finding relevant sites to link to you

Finding relevant sites that will link back to you is not as difficult as it may seem. You probably know lots of people with sites that have similar content to your own. When you run out of friends to link back to you, you can go out and find more. Creating free social media profile sites to link back to your cattery site is also quite effective. But know that excessive link building can actually be harmful.

Beware of aggressive link building

Aggressive link building CAN get your site penalized or even banned from the search engines. Manipulating the search engines is frowned upon (by the search engines themselves), so they want to see natural, organic link building. The more naturally spontaneous the links back to your site seem, the more the search engines will value your site.  Each link back to your site is like a “vote” that your site is worthwhile. If the sites linking back to you are of similar content, (like cat sites linking to other cat sites), the search engines will value your site even more. This is why it is very important to ensure your web designer knows how to properly build links back to your site.

How do sites get banned or penalized and what does that even mean? Well, if you go out and about getting links back to your site from every single site you can find – the search engines may “flag” your site as suspicious. Hundreds of links from sites that are not relevant to your own (similar content) will also flag your site as suspicious. A human editor from that search engine will be sent to your site to decide whether you are trying to manipulate the search engines or are getting these links naturally because those site owners want to link to you.

A penalized site will lose page rank – that means your site will lose authority and will not show up on the first several pages of the search engine. A banned site will become completely de-indexed – deleted from the search engines entirely. And that means even if you search your full domain name, you will not show up on the search engines. If your site is de-indexed, that’s a kiss of death for your online business.

When you are looking for links back to your site, make sure they come from sites that are relevant to your own. Don’t flood the internet with 100’s of back links at a time and make sure the sites you get links from are family friendly. It is said that any site on the internet is only a few clicks away from porn or illegal content, do your homework and make sure your site does not become guilty by association to a non-friendly site.