Link Building Strategies & Leveraged Links
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009Of the well-known SEO techniques to optimize a site to be found in search engine results, one is the off-page technique of link building. Off-page means the links are not on your website – they are links originating on pages on the Internet (on other people’s websites or in web directories) that link to your site. These are also called backlinks – they link “back” to your website or blog. Backlinks are how websites build “authority” in web search results – having more links to your site gives it authority and will make it rank better for search results.
If any of you know about getting your websites or blogs ranked in search engines (meaning they show up in the first pages of search engines when people search for specific search words or phrases), then you know you need to have links to your site to rank well. So, there are 2 main ways to get these links to your website.
- Manual links
- Leveraged links
Manual Links
Manual linking is done by adding your websites as favorites in social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and others. In the past many people did link exchanges to get links. Link exchanges are not popular now – partly due to the fact that they are 2-way links (I link to you and you link to me) which tend to cancel out each other as far as the search engines see them. That means they have little value. More valuable links are 1-way links. They come from a site to yours but you don’t link back to that same website. Other manual links are internal links you can create from one page of your website to another page.
Leveraged Links
One definition of leverage is “exert power or influence on.” That is what leveraged links do – the increase the power or influence of your website. The best links to get are 1-way links from other websites to your site or your blog. But the better 1-way links would be from sites with high authority (those that have earned search engine trust by having many backlinks, domain age and higher Google page rank or PR) – these are leveraged links and they pass some of the authority to your website.
In a nutshell, having a link from a website with high google PR is equal to many links from non-authority websites. So, the strategy should be to find ways to get those high authority websites to link to your website.
Link Building Strategies
The link building strategies I am using include social bookmarking, posting to other people’s blogs (with valuable comments – not spammy ones), and using content to generate links – such as with Article Marketing Automation (read the review), which I still highly recommend.
Link building with leveraged links is hot topic right now and I’m sure that I’ll be adding more about this strategy in the future.


