..actually, by Melanie Nathan

So you’ve SEO’d your site… your title tags are perfect, meta descriptions on every page, alt text on all the images and nice relevant content etc, etc…. now what? … Link building!

Among other factors, Google relies on other websites to determine how popular your website is. The more websites that link to yours, the more popularity ‘votes’ you have. The more votes you have, the better your search engine rankings will be. The better your SE rankings are, the more traffic you’ll get to your site. And so on and so on. This is the circle of linking and search.

Four Common Link Terms to Know:

Backlink - a link to any page within your site from any other web page.

Anchor text - the linked text that is ‘clickable’ (i.e. I love that blue widget I saw!).

Reciprocal links – you link to my site, I’ll link back to yours. ( these aren’t as affective)

One way links - you link to my site. I don’t link back to yours. ( these are best but hardest)

Granted, some backlinks are easy to get (i.e. fill in a form and hit submit) but others, especially the