Link building is a skill which is an extremely valuable asset on online. Without a sufficient amount of link building knowledge you may find yourself repeatably falling short on those keywords. Luckily we have written this post which should give you all the knowledge required to get out their and begin building links for your websites.
Why Build Links?
A question on many beginner webmaster minds is why should they build links, here are the main two reasons:
Traffic – A well placed link can send you hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your website. An example of this is getting a link to your site from a major news website. If your website was a shop, links would be the roads leading people to it.
Search Engine Rankings – Links are the number one indicator of what your page is about, after content. If you have hundreds of people linking to you with the anchor text ‘long tail niche blogging’ there is a good chance you will rank for that term in the search engines. The more competitive the term, the more higher quality links you will need.
Link Relationships
A standard hyperlink looks like this: <a href=”http://whycompete.com”>Why Compete</a> However you can add relationships to the links which tell the search engine spiders what to do when they reach the link.
Rel=”Nofollow” – This relationship tells the spider to follow the link but not pass any ‘link juice’ to it. I will often link use the nofollow tag when linking out to sites which I think may be using questionable tactics. In other words using nofollow lets the search engines know I am not associating myself with that website.
Rel=”Noindex” - This relationship tells the spider not to index the page you are linking to, obviously if someone else links to it without the “noindex” tag then it will be indexed. Noindex is often used when you are linking to pages on your site such as ‘archives’ which you don’t really want indexed.
Type of links
A simple text hyperlink is not the only way to link to a web page, there are other ways too, by understanding this you may be able to come up with some cunning link building strategies 
Text Hyperlink
For the time being simple text links are the strongest links you can receive, simply for the fact that you can use an anchor text.
Image Hyperlink
An often overlooked link building strategy is image links, image links may not be as strong as text links but they are still links non-the-less. Just look how well alltop have done from their 125 x 125 badges.
Value of Links
A common mantra in the link building industry is “Not all links are equal”. It may seem obvious but many people seem to forget it.
No one (except for search engine engineers) can know all the factors that increase a links value, or how much weight each factor holds. However from practical experience it becomes quite apparent what factors affect the value of a link.
Here are some of the major factors:
Anchor Text
I’ve put this at the top as it is one of the list as it is hugely important. If you are attempting to rank for a keyword their is nothing more powerful than someone linking to your with the keyword as the anchor text.
Link Diversity
Getting hundreds or even thousands of banklinks isn’t really hard at all, in fact it’s as simple as getting a site wide link on a website with a lot of pages. The search engines realise this and give more weight to websites which have links from a variety of websites instead of just one.
Site/Page Relevance
As you will probably find out, links from webpages which share a topic with yours hold much more weight than links from unrelated websites.
Site Age
In life the older somebody is, the more authority they should have, and it’s the same on the Internet. The search engines show much more love to the older websites.
Link Age
Just as it matters how old the website which your link is on is, it also matters how long your link is. The longer it has been there the better,
No. of External Links on Page
Imagine you had a cake to give away, the more people you shared it with, the less cake each one received. This is how link juice works, the more links on a page the weaker each one becomes.
Incoming Links
In this point I am talking about incoming links to the page which your link is on. A link is going to be of a lot higher quality if it is on a page with 1,000 incoming links than one with no links pointing to it.
Toolbar Pagerank
Strictly speaking the PageRank you see within your toolbar isn’t perfect, hence why we call it toolbar PageRank and not just PageRank. However if you are just looking at a quick way to assess the quality of a page I find Toolbar PageRank to be very useful.
