Content of your site is the key to SEO, is what you have known for long but there is something equally important which will decide on your SEO campaign. This feature is called link building. The search engines pay considerable importance to the linking structure of the websites as well. They analyze what type and how important websites are linking to you and even what these websites have to say about you. Getting a link from the leader website in that industry could improve your page rank drastically with the search engines. The more links you have from more leaders, your importance rises higher and higher. While at the same time getting unrelated links to the tune of hundreds may fetch you no results in terms of search engine page ranks. What matters is getting related links and that too coming from quality websites.

Of late a major emphasis is being laid on link building to get a high rank with most search engines. Earlier simpler things like meta tags, keyword density and some other features were just enough to get a good ranking. But with the rise in the number of websites each day and the competition between websites to get a higher ranking with search engines new features are being added to evaluate the ranks by the search engines. As a result of these increasing features, has come up the concept of link building to increase the relative importance of a website.

When evaluating you website on the basis of the links the search engines consider things like who is linking to your site, what is written in those links about your website, what keywords or key phrases are used in those links, the quality of the site that link to you, how many links are going outwards from your site and how many are coming inwards. Apart from these the linking sites reputation is also checked by analyzing who all are linking to the site that is linking to your website. These are a few of the things that will determine your site worth in terms of linking to decide what rank you get in the search results.

It is a combination of both the content and the link worthiness that will decide the fate of your SEO efforts. It can be well explained that if content is the brain links are the heart, and they have to work together to keep you running.

With so much of importance being given to links one is desperate to find out how can one get links. To begin with you need to come back to the brain that is the content, your content need to be of high quality and great worth. Only if your content is good other good sites may want to link up to your site. Let your website be full of worthy content on the particular subject around which it is built. The next thing is to look up for websites which could benefit from the information that is available on your website. Several new websites may want to link with you for the information.

For instance if you have a travel related website giving information to the tourists about every thing in a specific area, the local hotels and cab services may want to link up to your site to offer more information to their visitors about that area. It is important that you are able to have some strong and compelling reason why the other sites must link up to you, and there can be nothing better than good content to achieve this target. You can have some kind of free services to offer which can increase the worth of your site. Anything that will increase the worth of your website for the users can turn out to be a way to get good links coming to your website.

When you are ready to ask for website to link to you the question of how one solicits links to ones website arises. You will have to start sending out personalized emails to these websites from whom you want a link. Never do the blunder of mass emailing and spamming to get links. Depending on how good and convincing is your link request email, you would soon have some positive replies. You may not get a very good response, but that should not disappoint you. The winning strategy in the game is to keep trying with patience and more innovation every time. A small tip to mention here is that dont waste your time and energy on websites which have not been updated fro a long time. Sending an initial email request may not be enough, you must follow up with each request you send. Dont let your proposal sound too artificial formal and exaggerated. Always try to add in a personal touch to give a feeling that you are requesting a link only for them and this will have a deeper impact.

You could also make submissions to directories. But always submit to reputed directories as getting listed in good directories is appreciated by the search engines. Getting a link from these directories could multiply your worth. The directories will love you if you submit in the right category with a good description and title written as per their specification.

To end it all the process of link building can be a time consuming and tiring experience, but the results could make substantial changes to your search engine rankings. It does ask for hard work but then it does get rewarded suitably too.

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