SEO Learning Center >> Link Building

How to Build One-Way Links

What's the big deal with one-way links in terms of search engine ranking? What does a link building company do? Can I build my own links for better search rankings, and if so how do I go about it?

These are the questions we will address in this lesson on search engine optimization.

First, let's start with a basic definition. A one-way link is exactly what it sounds like. It's a link to your website from another website that is not reciprocated. For example, if I place a link on this page to your website, but you do not link back to me, then it would be a one-way link from my site to yours. If you linked back to me, then we would have reciprocal links.

How Links Related to SEO

So what does all of this have to do with search engine optimization? Good question. Search engines rank websites on a number of different criteria. Link popularity is one of those criteria. It's terminology time...

Link popularity refers to the quantity and quality of websites that link to your website. If you have a lot of quality websites linking to your site, then consider yourself lucky. You have a lot of link popularity, and the search engines (particularly Google) will reward you with higher rankings for this.

On the other hand, if there aren't very many websites linking to yours (or if only low-quality sites are linking to you), then your link popularity is low. In this case, you've got some work to do.

Reciprocal vs. One-Way Links

When you think of Internet links as votes or recommendations, this will all begin to make more sense. A search engine wants to list the most popular and useful websites toward the top of the results. This is good for people who are using the search engine, because they see the quality sites first. This is the primary reason the link popularity factor was introduced.

When a website is extremely helpful, informative, entertaining, controversial — or anything that attracts attention — then other websites will naturally link to that site. This is how the Internet is supposed to work! So search engines use these one-way links as a factor in their ranking process.

A lot of people think reciprocal links are bad, and that they will hurt your rankings in the search engines. This is not true. Reciprocal links are simply one of the social aspects of the Internet. I like your website, so I link to it. You like my site, so you do the same.

But some people go overboard with the whole reciprocal linking thing, in an attempt to artificially inflate their search engine rankings. These people participate in reciprocal linking schemes with other webmasters. This defeats the purpose of link popularity. Instead of attracting a lot of one-way links by having a quality website, these webmasters are trying to trick the system.

• Google says the following: "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank ... as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Yahoo echoes this guideline: "Some examples of the more common types of content that Yahoo! does not want include ... sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity (link schemes)."
• MSN / Live Search says the same: "Techniques that may prevent your site from appearing in Live Search results ... using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your page."

Why don't search engines link this kind of scheme? Because it defeats the purpose of link popularity. Think of your own search behavior for a moment. When you look something up in Google, Yahoo or MSN, you don't want to find a bunch of crappy websites that manipulated their way to the top of the search engines. You want to find truly useful and popular websites with quality information ... the kind of sites that naturally attract one-way links from other webmasters.

Link Building Companies

Search engine rankings are important to all business owners. And one-way links help improve those rankings. So when you put these two things together, you can see why a "cottage industry" of link building companies has sprung up over the years. Search engine optimization (SEO) is big business these days, and building one-way links is a key component of SEO. But there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

If you build links the right way, your rankings will consistently improve over time. This translates to more website traffic, and more business success in general. But if you build links the wrong way (such as the reciprocal linking schemes we talked about), your website can actually be penalized with lower rankings. And in case you were wondering, all search engines have the technology to spot these kinds of schemes.

So if you ever hire a link building company to help you improve your search engine visibility, make sure they know what they are doing. Trust me ... there are plenty of so-called SEO "firms" out there that only know enough to be dangerous! I can't tell you how many of my clients have been burned by companies like this in the past.

But here's the good news — you don't have to hire an SEO company to build one-way links for your website. You can do it yourself. I personally feel that any company that depends on search engine traffic should have an in-house SEO expert managing their website. That might be out of your reach right now, so let's talk about some of the low-cost ways you can build one-way links to your site.

Some of the ways you can improve your link popularity:

• Article marketing
• Press release distribution
• Website directories

The "Secret" for Link Building Success

It never ceases to amaze me how many people are "scrambling" for links when their website doesn't even deserve them. The first step of any SEO program should be improving the website in every way possible. Add quality content, resources and tools. Make the website easier to use. Improve the design. Make it unique. Do these things first, before you focus on a link-building program, and you'll have a much easier time of it.

Webmasters will never link to a bare-bones website that doesn't offer anything useful. So if your website falls into this category, your link building program will be an uphill climb. On the other hand, if you work hard to develop a great site with plenty of useful content, people will be much more inclined to link to it ... you won't even have to ask them to do it.

I refer to this as reaching "critical mass." At first, you have to grow your link popularity through the proactive techniques I've listed above. But eventually, great websites reach a point of "critical mass" where they begin to attract links without any link-building effort from the owner. This is what you should strive for!

Related item: How do search engines rank websites?