When you are maintaining your own website, website marketing is most probably one of the biggest things that you worry about. A website can only be as effective as the marketing that you put into it and one of the most effective yet least expensive way that you can market your website is through link building.

In its most basic form, link building is simply you asking someone else to put up a link to your website in their website. By reciprocation, you could also add a link to that someone's website to your website as well.

The main purpose of link building is to encourage people who visit a website to follow a link for another website with, presumably, related content to the one they were last on. In the contemporary sense, link building is analogous to how doctors refer a patient to other doctors for the purpose of medicine and health.

In terms of cost, link building is ideally free. The main thinking behind link building is to increase the exposure of your website. So, you approach another website, probably one whose products and services complement your products and services, and ask him or her to put up a link in his website to yours. In return, he or she also asks for you to put up a link in your website pointing to his or her website. The net effect of this would be that visitors to his or her website can potentially visit your website through the link he or she provided in his or her website. Your visitors can also potentially link to his or her website via the same process. It is a win-win scenario which a lot of websites have employed time and again with great success.

Because of the nature of link building, it would be more beneficial for you if your link is placed in a website where a huge traffic is generated daily. A huge traffic translates to an increased possibility that a person browsing from that web page will link to yours. Thus, it is best if you can link build towards a large website with a large volume of traffic. One drawback to this is that, since the website is already established and enjoys a lot of online prestige, there is a possibility that they would ask for a fee in exchange for putting up a link to your site.

Of course, when you are link building, try to link build only to websites who have complementary content with yours. This would be the practical way to go. Thus, if you are selling computers, then you would be well served if you added a link to a web page whose product is computer tables.

Finally, you can enhance your link building options by making sure that you conform to the online adage that content is king. Thus, make sure that your website has interesting and engaging content. This will increase interest in your website, make more people constantly visit your website and also increase your likelihood of receiving link building requests thus increasing your website's exposure.

Adrian McLean is the Managing Director of Search Engine Optimising (SEO), one of the leading search engine optimisation firms in the UK. For more information about link building please visit www.searchengineoptimising.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Link Popularity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.