Why and how to request for link building opportunities

 Link building is a complex issue.

 Within the online marketing industry one of the most difficult issues to accomplish with any.   degree of success is #LinkBuilding

This blog post will help you to have a deeper understanding of the complexities around link building and offer you some advice on what you need to do to prepare your online marketing team for the rather controversial task of requesting other online information providers to place links to your content within articles, stories, blog posts, web pages or other online content which they own or manage.

I answer SEO questions in Quora 

So we need to start with what links are and where search engines use links. 

Every link has two ends. The origin and the destination. All search engines use both sides in different ways, and treat every link with the same due diligence. There are a large number of semantic tools. These Semantic Tools are basically very large data bases that are used in conjunction with other data bases to evaluate your online content

.  

Some of these semantic tools are listed below. The links in your online content connect both the origin and destination pages to each other, allowing search engines to  build these semantic  tools into rather devious and mind twisting tools that investigate so many  different issues that impact on your online discoverability. 

#LinkMaps

#KnowledgeMaps

#EntityMaps

#TrustMaps

#KnowledgeTrustGraphs

#EntityLinkMaps

#KnowledgeLinkGraphs

This above list is extremely limited and search engines use many hundreds more.  The links in your online content connect your content to these semantic tools and allow search engines to better interpret the 

Aims 

Objectives

Purpose

Intent

Keywords value and other related search engine optimisation Value Indicators or SEOVI 

This means that each link within your entire online asset base (link origin)  is used many times over to develop an understanding of your content. The destination side gets treated the same in the early stages of developing these first line semantic tools. Both end are needed to connect things together. The information in each link is added to these many data bases and expands the data in each database by including the content in your online content and linking this to the existing online content allowing these semantic tools to have access to your online content for very strange and devious search algorithms to use at their discretion.

Thinking of the above issues, your internal linking strategies need to be well planned and keep the focus of the page in which they originate in mind, ensuring that the conversation is expanded in meaningful ways.

You do need to update old posts and articles to link to new content. This is usually neglected, and can be very powerful in a number of ways, especially when quality is thought about and considered as important.

Link building does have two sections after all. One is internal link building and the other is external link building.

Your content does need both internal and external links. So think long and hard about your internal link building tactics before looking at inbound and external links.

Before you start asking for external in bound links (#BackLinks) be sure to have some external out bound links in place within your own content, which you can use as a tool to entice others to link to your content.

Link building is not an easy thing to do, and you do need all the help you can get. Very few folks understand how and where links are used by search engine algorithms. So having external outbound links in your content can help, when you try to explain to potential link partners what the value of external out bound links is, and how it has helped you. 

Describing your own experiences is always easier than describing other folks experiences. Having done this yourself allows you to demonstrate your own Expertise. If you have other folks who have already linked to your page in question that is also helpful. If your content uses internal book marks, getting your link partners to link to the book mark in question can be easier and more helpful to the scores at both ends of the link.

Explaining this to others may not be very easy, but link building as a whole is not easy anyways.  When you do research around link building you will discover that there is many areas where folks provide SNAKE OIL and say that one should not place external links in your online content because it gives the end user an opportunity to leave your page and go else where for the information that they are looking for. If this is true or not is one issue, but getting the end user to your site in the first place, is also an issue that needs to be considered. Now your SEO TACTICS are what will get your content discovered in the search engine in the first place. If the end user does not find your information near the top of the SERP he / she will never have been on your site in the first place. Out bound links in your content is a very big quality signal for all search engines. Out bound links in your content demonstrates to search engines that you have confidence in your own content and are not into LOCK IN MODE where you will try every trick to ensure that the end user stays locked into your content.  Placing external links in your pages shows that you have pride and trust in your own content. This is a very strange but rather important quality signal that few folks grasp. 

The LOCK IN MODE issue was in the past a very powerful, but stupid approach to ensuring an end user never leaves your pages. This is still advocated by many, but most folks these days understand this a bit better. They also understand the SEO VALUE of out bound external links a bit better. You may come across the bad thinking of lock in mode when doing link building, so take the time and effort to prepare documentation around this that you may give to potential content owners who are reluctant to enter into some kind of link swap or similar deal when linking to your content.

The name #BackLinks comes a long way back and is an indication of the link swap idea that was initially in place. Ie if you place a link to my content in your content I will LINK BACK to your content. This comes from the very early stages of link building way back in 1998 / 1999 before Google became famous, when Yahoo and ask Jeeves were the bigger search tools available.  

Link building has come a long way since then and unsolicited back links are quite common for good online content that answers common questions within any specific online niche space.

So link building is getting more attention and folks are beginning to grasp the concepts around link building, but they do still need a little gentle persuasion of some kind.  So you do need to prepare a document of some kind explaining the purpose of placing external out bound links and the benifits of placing links directly to bookmarks in your own content.

If you do not already have bookmarks within your own content I suggest you evaluate the SEO VALUE of book marks and placing your own internal links to the book marks you add to your own content.  Think of the parragraff and block Content issues .. 

Hope this helps

#Frankie2Socks