Create a Link Building Strategy
Once you get your website or blog all setup with it’s layout, quality content and the right keywords/phrases implimented in the structure of the site and in it’s content you most likely will start looking at what is needed to create a link building strategy.

If you have done your market research and studied your target audience properly you will already know where they “hang out” and what sites they visit regularly.
Before sitting down to create a link builidng strategy there is some background information you need so you end up building links efficiently. We’ll start with the basics.
What is a Link?
A link, also called a hyperlink, uses the anchor set of tags to make the text they surround clickable. Once clicked you are taken to another page or document on the net.
The Anchor tag is used to link the current web document to others available on the internet e.g. another spot in the same document, to specific spot in another document, to a different page or file, to client’s email program or to break out of a frame. The default is to open the linked item in the same window.
HTML 4.01 Basics Simplified – Basic HTML 4.01 Tags – Anchor Tag Chapter
For example, to link to another website you would use:
<a href="http://www.thesitedomainname.com">Name of site you are linking to</a>
This is the same coding you would give someone else if they want to link to your site (with your website address in it instead of thesitedomainname.com).
What is Link Building?
Link building is when you work on the number of places on the net where there is a link leading to a page on your site. These links can be from other websites or blogs, directories, forums, ads you place, newsletters, articles you have submitted and anywhere else you can think of on the net including within your own site.
The way people find things on the net is through links therefore if you have links spread around the net you have more opportunities for people to find your site.
Link building is more than just leaving your link anywhere on the net. Where you are linked to from is also important. The search engines look at the site where the link is originating from and the text surrounding it. The sites that are of the same theme/niche that you are or a related niche are much more valuable than a link from a totally different topic. e.g. If you sell things for women then a link on a car site isn’t as good as a link from say a purse or shoe site if they sell things that complement what you sell. Think of it this way also, not too many who would interested in your things for women site are going to be hanging out at a car site, click the link and turn into a buyer. You would have better success getting targeted traffic from another women’s related site.
For example, Google says:
In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.
Ranking at Google Webmaster Central
Google also says the following about their PageRank system:
PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.
Technology Overview- Google Corporate Information
Types of Links for Link Building
There are 4 basic types of links for your link building strategy:
- Internal – linking to different pages on your own site.
- Organic – you showed up in the search results and someone clicked the link
- Incoming – a link from somewhere on the net that points to your site. These show up in your website stats as referrals if someone clicked the link and arrived at your site.
- Outbound – you have a link on your site that links to another site.
All of these types of links are looked at by the search engines and count as part of their scoring system when determining how your indexed page fits the search term someone typed in the search box.
Why Create a Link Building Strategy?
If you don’t have a link building strategy in place then you will be wasting your time and effort (and money if you pay for links) by creating incoming links willy nilly all over the place.
The purpose of creating a link building strategy is to build high quality targeted incoming traffic. Placing or getting incoming links creates a visibility for your site and adds credibility to it also. Each of these high quality targeted links counts as a vote for your site.
Take all the information you gathered in your market research and when determining the traits of your target audience and start to create a link building strategy. Don’t get off track by worrying about the numbers at first. A well planned link building strategy will turn into hundreds of links from people you don’t know or have not thought about.
