Contextual Link Building – What Is It And How To Build Them

If you want to gain high rankings in the search engines you need to focus on 2 crucial factors. The first one is to make sure all your web pages are optimized to enable the search engine spiders to easily index and rank your site. The second most important factor is building incoming links (backlinks) to your website. The quality, quantity and variety of links will determine how quickly your rankings increase.

Some of the most popular link building methods website owners employ include commenting on blogs, forums, submitting to search engines, directories, social bookmarking and sharing content through social media sites. One little known but highly effective method is contextual link building.

What is Contextual Link Building?

This refers to creating links within your content. Many website owners are already doing this without being aware of it (or not knowing what’s it’s called). These are high quality links because they occur within the natural flow of the content instead of creating them artificially through directory submissions, etc.

What are the benefits?

Boost search engine rankings

It takes less time to boost your search engine rankings if you focus on high quality links rather than the quantity of links. For instance a contextual link from a high ranking web property may be equal to 100 or more low quality links.

Gain lots of visitors

If your website gains first page rankings on Google and other major search engines it will be exposed to more searches than on the second page or successive pages. This will naturally result in gaining lots of visitors.

Become recognized as an authority in your niche

One of the great consequences of higher rankings and more website visitors is becoming an authority in your niche. As you produce more content it will natually get shared by others thus extending your audience.

How to build contextual links

1. Article directories

Most article directories allow you to include contextual links in the resource box at the end of your article. This typically includes a call to action and a short bio of the author (in that order). Try to make a smooth transition from your content to the resource box.

For example if I want the reader to download a free report from my website I could say “Download my free report on “How to Market Your Website” then link the phrase “how to market your website” to my site’s URL.

2. Blog posts

Are you practicing internal linking between blog posts? Whenever you create a new blog post think about related posts you have already written and can link to within your content. This will result in your new blog post getting indexed and ranked almost immediately. I’ve often experienced obtaining first page rankings for a blog post targeting a low competition keyword phrase.

3. PDF files

Did you know you can repurpose your article into a PDF file (containing contextual links) and submit it to file sharing websites. File sharing websites don’t limit your contextual links to the resource box so you can include them throughout your content. PDF files are indexed and ranked by the search engines so your PDF file may appear ahead of other content.

4. Ebook directories

This is similar to the method outlined above except you now have an ebook containing lots of pages with contextual links that can be indexed by the search engines. The most popular ebook directories receive tons of visitors and get indexed regularly by search engine spiders so you’ll benefit by piggybacking off their success.

5. Build relationships

Instead of only linking to your own content link to related content that helps your readers discover more in-depth information. For instance perhaps you consistently read an authority blog in your niche. Develop a relationship with this person by linking to his/her content then offer to write a guest post for their blog. You’ll not only receive a high quality link but also gain access to his regular readers.

Instead of focusing on large quantity of links from traditional link building methods focus on gaining high quality links through contextual link building. Your rankings will increase faster and you’ll attract more visitors.

Related Articles

Benefits of Backlinks and Their Importance
How to Backlink – 7 ways to build natural backlinks
How to Build Quality Backlinks
Automated vs Natural Backlinking – Which Method Is Most Effective?
How to Backlink – 7 ways to build natural backlinks

Discover how to BUILD NATURAL BACKLINKS by writing and publishing articles in my new ebook “Article Marketing Strategies

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Affordable Website Design in Maryland

Comments

  1. This is very nice information about link building.

    Thanks for the information..:)

    Thanks
    Mike

  2. Thanks for providing good information about seo service.I like this type of information which you have give in this blog

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