Link Building Strategies for Search Engine Optimization: Past and Present

Almost a decade ago, when the Internet was in the dark ages, optimizing a website for the major search engines presented no problem to the average webmaster. The Yahoo search engine was launched in 1995, and only three years later, Microsoft search entered the search engine field, followed by Google. All the three search engines were pretty immature and fledgling at that time, and so were quite easy to manipulate. All that a webmaster needed to do before submitting the site for consideration was to adjust the meta-tags, H1 tags, and same site link URLs of the page to include the targeted keywords. Within a few days, the website would occupy a top 20 or even a top 10 spot on the search results of one or more search engines.

Times have since changed. The major search engines have gone through a steady process of evolution over the last 15 years and are getting smarter and smarter with each day passing. Today, a major factor in calculating a webpage's ranking on the search results is the total number of inbound links pointing to the page, referred to as link popularity. Consequently, it has become almost impossible for the average webmaster to manipulate the search results because the links on other sites are beyond his control. This does not mean that on-page factors do not count anymore. The number of times that a targeted keyword appears within the meta-tags and within the overall content of the page still counts, however it does not carry that much weight as it used to.

Furthermore, even raw link popularity is not of much use. The search engine giant Google which holds a major share of the searches conducted over the Internet (more than 85%) introduced the concept of page rank (PR) to determine how valuable an inbound link is. Consequently, if there are two competing websites A and B having 2500 and 500 inbound links respectively, it is not necessary that website A will rank higher than website B. If the 500 inbound links are from authoritative pages of high quality (i.e. high page rank), whereas the 2500 links are from bad quality webpages, website B will easily outrank website A in the search engine results. It is therefore evident that a webmaster should try to get inbound links from pages that are of as high page rank as possible.

When webmasters, entrepreneurs, and online businesses realized a couple of years ago that link popularity had become a dominant factor in deciding a site's ranking, they sought different techniques and strategies in order to acquire incoming links. One of the earliest strategies used was a reciprocal link exchange campaign. The webmaster would create a links directory within his own website and then find sites related to his own site's theme. This was followed by placing links to sites within the relevant categories and sending emails to webmasters of those sites requesting them to do the same. This strategy worked for a few years, however the search engine giant Google, well known by the nick Big G, quickly started frowning upon these types of links. Such links are now regarded by Google as "you scratch my back, I scratch yours".

When reciprocal links lost their effectiveness, webmasters sought alternative ways in order to increase their link popularity. Since reciprocal links can easily be detected by a search engine bot, a natural alternative strategy that was stumbled upon was three-way linking, or even better 4-way linking. In this scenario, at least one of the webmasters needs to have 2 sites of related theme. The link to the second webmaster's site would be offered on the first of these sites, whereas the webmaster would be requested to link to the second site. In this case, both sites would appear to have a one-way link and the search engines would no longer regard it as a deal between the two webmasters. There is an ongoing debate within the search engine optimization and webmaster community as to whether it is possible for the search engines to detect this type of link exchange.

What ever link scheme is used, one thing is for sure: it is not approved by any of the major search engines. In fact, Google underlines this point in its webmaster's guidelines that it strongly disapproves any type of link scheme. So the only legitimate method that can still be used to acquire valuable links is through writing compelling content. If you can write content that can address the problems that people have, or that can satisfy the hunger for the information that they're looking for, you've certainly got a strong tool for promoting your website. Search engine optimization communities have been buzzing with the slogan "content is King" for the last 10 years or so. This solution is not only better in the long-term, but it also frees you of any fears of penalties from the search engines since it conforms to the standards and practices they advocate.

Basically, there are two ways of attracting traffic to your website through content writing. The first one is the most straightforward one. You can write content in the form of articles for your site or in the form of advice based on your experience for visitors that come across your site. If the content is valuable and there are enough people on the Internet searching for it, you can rest assured that Google is going to reward you for it. The more that Google appreciates your content, the more targeted visitors is it going to send to your website. This method does not contribute that much towards increasing your link popularity. However, it can still be useful if you're able to attract a handsome amount of traffic to your site. This is because a certain percentage of the visitors to your site are always likely to pick up the content that they like for publication on their own websites, in which case they are bound to publish a link to your website in the biography section of the article. It is therefore highly advisable that you include a biography section at the end of every article that you publish on your site, which includes a link to your website with your targeted keywords as the anchor text.

The other method is to write articles for article directories or other authoritative sites in your niche. This method is the most aggressive from the point of view of increasing the link popularity of your site. If your content gets accepted on authority article directories or other good quality sites that Google loves, your link popularity is guaranteed to increase over the course of time. Here again, the raw numbers are not important, which means that you do not need to submit your article to every article directory that exists on the World Wide Web. Look only for a handful of article directories with good page rank and Alexa traffic. This will not only give you targeted traffic to achieve your short-term goals, but will also ensure that your content spreads over the web so that you can achieve your long-term goal of boosting your link popularity.

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