Link building is an important part of running a successful website. During the early days of the web, search engines relied on links as a way to gauge the popularity and importance of websites. Today, the major search engines have more sophisticated, and accurate, ways to decide which websites should appear at the top of the search results, but that doesn’t mean link building is not important. Many of your visitors will find your website through links, and being associated with other high quality websites is valuable for brand building and SEO. These tips will help you to learn link building techniques that work.

Build Links for The Right Reasons

Before you solicit a link from any website, think about why you want it. If the only reason you’re looking for a link is because you want to increase the number of incoming links you have, don’t waste your time. The only links you should be chasing are ones from websites that belong in your niche. A good link adds value to your site, and to the site that is linking to you. Do you really think that the other webmaster’s visitors will be interested in your content?

Give Webmasters a Reason to Link to You

Bloggers that run high quality websites get a huge number of link requests every day. If you want them to take the time to answer your questions then you need to make your request stand out. An email that simply says “please link to me” is likely to get deleted without a second thought. Before you send out a link request, think about whether you would respond to a similar request. If you wouldn’t, don’t send that email. Try to come up with a compelling reason to link to your site. Offer something of value (a discount, ebook, or infographic), because you’re getting something of value in return (a link).

Ditch Those Metrics

Traditional link building wisdom says that you shouldn’t waste your time with sites that have a poor Alexa rank, low Page Rank or low Domain Authority. In this case, traditional wisdom is wrong. Metrics are easy to manipulate, and many low quality sites have good looking metrics. In contrast, many high quality sites have poor metrics because the webmasters that run them don’t care about getting a number on a tool bar to move in the right direction. Use your own mind to judge whether you want to work with a particular website.

Be Consistent

Don’t make the mistake of going on a link building spree once every few months and building a huge number of links in a short space of time. Google may erroneously (or correctly!) identify those links as spam. Instead, try to spend a few minutes each week on link building. A steady trickle of high quality links is better for your brand and for SEO.

Treat Link Building Like Networking

Remember that there are real people behind those websites that you’re working with. Treat those people with respect. Thank them for their time if they answer your emails, even if they say no to linking to you at the moment. Become a part of the community in your niche, and you’ll find link building efforts get easier and easier.

Philippa has written this article to help readers improve on their linkbuilding. She wrote this article on behalf of the IsClicksureAScam site; connect with them, here.