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Unmatched One-Way Link Building: Contextual Link Building

Sunita Biddu

February 05, 2009

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In modern internet marketing, the best and most profitable websites are the ones that can consistently get good positions on search engine result pages (SERP). You’ll have to make your site climb up the page rankings to the first or second SERP if you want to sufficiently reach your target market. Although one-way link building has been proven to be very effective, contextual link building is the best (legal) way to get those results.

One-Way Link Building: The Old Method

Link building became a popular technique for improving search engine optimization (SEO) ever since it was found that Google’s PageRank algorithm considered a site’s popularity based on the number of one-way or inbound links. This, however, was open for abuse; link building services mushroomed, artificially pumping up websites using link farms – entire pages that contained just one-way links to other sites.

Google soon amended PageRank to detect instances of such underhanded practices in internet marketing. Pretty soon, it wasn’t just the number of one-way links to a website that was being considered, but also where those links were coming from. That’s where contextual link building comes in.

How Contextual Link Building Works

This modified technique involves a certain site that talks about a topic related to your own page, and then places a one-way link to your site somewhere in the text. Contextual link building is thus most often done in places like blogs, ezine pages and shopping sites. You would have to make an agreement with one such site in order to have them create a relevant page and maintain a link to your site somewhere within that page.

Contextual Link Building Works Better

You’ll most likely be better off using contextual link building instead of plain old one-way link building because it’s more ethical. It’s not just a question of morals or ethics, though; search engines tend to penalize or even altogether ban sites that have been detected to use black hat SEO techniques like link farming.

At the same time, contextual link building gives you more opportunities to convert your site traffic into sales, signups or leads. The article or page containing your link could already be a buildup or a preliminary sales talk for your main pitch. By the time the people click on the link, they’d already have been convinced to a certain extent and you’d have less convincing and pushing to do.

Contextual link building thus makes for a more comprehensive internet marketing strategy made up of:

•    Better SERP placements because of the increased number of one-way links, meaning people using those search engines will be likelier to visit your site

•    An article or a block of text that contains your link while informing the reader or promoting your site at the same time

•    Improved popularity of the context article because search engines will most probably pick up all the other keywords and meta tags that it contains. This popularity then gets passed on to your own site because the article points to it.

Hiring a professional SEO company that knows how to do contextual link building will help you get the results – and the page rankings – that you want, legally.

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