If you want to get free Search Engine Traffic, then one of the most important factors is the amount of links pointing to your website. Now there are many types of links, and some of these links can occur naturally, and sometimes you may want to manually build those links, and in the second case, this action is known as Link Building.
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Now let’s take a look at the first type of Link Building which is to get one-way links. Now, in this scenario, Site B and Site C would link to your site, which is Site A. And any link from Site B to your site, Site A, is considered one-way link. And the same happens with Site C, when Site C decides to link to you, that is another one-way link. So now, your website, Site A, has two one-way links from two different websites. Now, one-way links are often the most sought-after types of links simply because everyone else links to you and you do not link to anyone else. This sort of creates your site into what is known as an authority site, and that would help you get lots of search engine traffic and will help your pages get ranked higher in search engine results.
However, getting one-way links is often the most difficult type of link-building method, simply because it truly depends on the owners of Site B and Site C to link to you naturally without being asked, and this can happen in many ways. The first and most important is if your site, Site A, has valuable web content that the owners of Site B and Site C feel their readers would benefit from, then, they would naturally link to your website. If your site, Site A, has also published several useful web-based tools that the owners of website B and website C feel their readers can benefit from, then again, they would naturally link to your Site A. And there are many other cases where Site A would tend to get natural one-way links from other websites. For instance, if you’re a news website and always have the latest news, then again, people would link to you. Or, it could also happen if you publish web templates or themes, or any other software that gives credit back to your website, then again, you would get a one-way link from all those websites using your theme, your templates, or your software.
The other type of link that you can manually build to your website is called a two-way link or also known as a Link Exchange. In this scenario, website B links to your site, Site A. But in return for that link, you are required to provide a link to website B. So in this scenario, what happens is that you have one inbound link from website B, but at the same time, you have one outgoing link to website B as well, and that creates what is called a Link Exchange. Now, this method of link building has been around for a very, very long time. It probably has been around since people started making money from their blog and since people started realizing that search engines tend to look at the amount of links you have on your website to determine how popular your website is and exactly how well they should rank your pages. So, to do a two-way link exchange is pretty simple. The owner of website B contacts the owner of website A, and says, Hey, we have two related pages or two related articles, why don’t in my article I’ll link to yours and in your article you link to mine? And if both parties agree, and then a two-way link is established.
Now this process can easily be repeated with other websites as well. For example, the owner of website C could also contact you and suggest that you link to his site on a different page and in return, he will give you a link back to your website. So this is one of the easier ways to build links to your website. But the downside of this is that for every inbound link to your website, you also have to produce an outbound link to other websites.
And now, let’s go to the third method to build links to your website, which is known as the Three-Way Linking Method. Now in this method, you, the owner of website A, will link to website B, and website B, instead of linking back to your website, as in the case of a Link Exchange, would link to website C. And website C would link back to website A, which is your website. And you can see how this creates a three-way link, or a three-way link exchange. None of these sites link to each other as they would in the case of a two-way link. Now, this type of linking can occur naturally, but in most cases, this is all manually done by the webmasters themselves using either just by emailing each other, or if you have many websites, and then you can always, for example, if you own website A and website C, and you can always contact the owner of website B and then do a three-way link exchange. But in most cases, webmasters always use some sort of link exchange or link-building software to create the scenario of three-way links.
In the previous screen, you have seen that the most desirable type of link is to get a one-way link, where other sites link to you and you do not link back to them. But then again, that is pretty hard to do for most average webmasters, and then you’ve seen two-way links or link exchanges, and how this type of link exchange, even though it’s easier to do, is not always something that you want to consider because it requires your website to be linking to tons of other websites out there. So three-way link is a more recent or a more updated way that combines one-way links and also two-way links.
Now to really enjoy the benefits of Link Building and SEO, and make sure that your websites are ranked high in search engines and continue to get free traffic from Google, etc., for a long period of time, there are a few factors that you need to consider. Now, the first is the quantity of links. Of course, the more links that you have, pointing to your website the better it is for your website in terms of search engine and SEO. But then again, these links should appear to be developing naturally. For example, if the first day you launch your website, all of a sudden you get 2,000 links to your website, then this tells search engines that you are doing something to get those 2,000 links, and those 2,000 links are not occurring naturally and therefore they may decide to penalize your website, or they may decide to not give you the search engine rankings that you actually deserve.
The second is the quality of links. If Yahoo, MSN, or even Your campus website links to your website, that is of course of a much higher quality than getting links from other lesser-known websites and of course, for every webmaster who would desire to get high-quality links from established portals or authority sites. But in most cases, you will need to accept links from a very wide range of quality. You will need to accept links from new websites, established websites, and hopefully, you will also get links from authority sites, like About.com, your campus website, or governmental websites, or even news portals.
The third is the amount of outgoing links. Now, if your website is an authority site and if it has really, really good content, then readers would expect the content to be linking to several other external sites where they can go for more information. So any website for that matter definitely has to have a few outgoing links to other websites and other resources on the Internet. But if you have too many outgoing links, then that also raises a red flag in search engines like Google who may determine that your website is doing nothing else but selling links to other websites.
And the fourth and most important is the amount of incoming links to your website. Now, the more incoming links you have, the better of course. And in most cases, in your link-building efforts, what you should focus on is getting more and more incoming links that are of course from different levels of quality, and just focus on getting as many links as possible, and also make sure that while you have a lot of links pointing to your website, to make it seem natural, you also need to have a small number of outgoing links. But in any case, you should always make sure that the amount of incoming links is more than the amount of outgoing links. So that is a brief introduction to Link Building and SEO. I hope you enjoyed this video.