Link Building: A Necessary Ingredient for Your Blog

The value of links for every blog post should never be underestimated. Despite the quality of content in your blog that could easily prompt you to wonder why the search engines would not just find your blog without necessarily undertaking any optimization efforts, the engines will still require your help to make them help you in return.
You need a highway or some form of boulevard for your ride through the city from one end to the other. Search engines need the links to trace their way from one web page to another.
Admittedly links are not the only thing about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However they are recognized by search experts as being core in determining what pages are more popular and important and this eventually determines the popping of these pages on search engine results.
A great deal of the search engines’ algorithms are attributed to link-based factors. They help the engines in establishing metrics such as trustworthiness of a page, its authority and cases of spam in addition to their analysis of page popularity.

Understanding The ‘Link’

There are a variety of link types and it is important to get the distinction in your link building efforts. The moment you create a website or a blog, that site automatically generates a link that could be used by any other pages or sites that would wish to interact with your content.
As such, all you need to utilize the power of this form of link is a powerful content that others will want. This kind is known as natural editorial link and appears naturally to other interacting sites or pages. They do not necessarily require any specific action in the SEO efforts.
Manual or outreach linkbuilding on the other hand entails creating of links by sending out emails to bloggers for link submission and submitting websites to targeted directories. You could as well pay for entries of any kind.
In this process you must appeal to the link target as to why and how creating the link is in their best interest or why such a process is worth undertaking. You may have to fill out forms for submissions to given website award programs or other similar procedures to earn qualification for your site’s inclusion in the public set up.
Aside from that, there are Self-Created links that are non-editorial in nature. Various websites all over the Internet have a provision for visitors to create links with them via forum signatures, guest book signings, and user profiles or through blog comments.
Such links create substantial impact for SEOs though the value they offer is considerably the lowest among the other types of links. Search engines generally cheapen such links and tend to penalize websites that depend on pursuit of these kinds of links.

Essential Considerations In Link Building

A link is only worthy if it plays to its purpose in your SEO efforts. A link that will work for your blog must take into consideration a number of the attributes of a link that a search engine will look for.

• The Anchor Text

Building a successful link requires a concise text that has all the relevance needed for the target page. This anchor text is one of the most crucial signals used by the various engines in their search rankings. The anchor text which refers to the visible words or characters displayed by hyperlinks when linking to another web content or location will indicate to the search engine that the particular site targeted is being considered relevant by the present site for the benefit of their users.
In the event that several links point to a page with the right selection of keywords then that particular page stands a high chance of ranking fine for the targeted group of texts or phrase in that anchor text.
This means that it would be most advisable when building links to approach as many bloggers as possible for manual outreach links that will redirect traffic to your blog. This will in turn optimize the ranking of your blog when search engines crawl through the web in search of needed content.

• Local Popularity Consideration

Links that are generated from sites that have content surrounding or within a particular topic-specific community suffice more as compared to those from general or out-of-the-topic sites when it comes to search engine activity.
Search Engine Optimization for your blog by utilizing links thus should utilize an optimum number of inbound linking from sites that share the same category of content or topic.

• Neighborhood of the link

Chances are that if you link to a site or page that has content deemed to be spam by the search engines then your site too is likely to be spammed. The common trend is that links go both directions and search engines know about this.
Spam sites are linked often to each other and one site is likely to have several other similar sites linked to it. As such, selecting the sites you link your blog with should be done with a level of caution. The same degree of caution should apply when you seeking the sites to receive links from.

• FreshRank

Search engines tend to favour fresh new links as compared to those that have been in use for long. This way sites and pages that appear at the top of the list of results by search engines may not remain the same over time as the links that redirect traffic to them lose strength with time. It is thus important to keep seeking and earning additional links to keep your blog marketable.

• Social Linking

Search engines consider socially shared links with less potency as compared to the other forms of links. This however does not mean you should ignore the value of social sharing in building links for your blog. There has been a boom in the amount of content being shared over the social platform; Google+, Facebook, Twitter among the other unmentioned social sites over the last few years.
Connecting your blog to these sites will definitely add the level of your visibility as many people are likely to interact with your blog content even if you leave pout the question of the engines. Besides, web presence optimization is not just about the search engine alone, rather it is about the people utilizing the content as well.