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Get that clear in your mind even before you try to get the first link to your blog. The links that you may get may vary based on one or more of the following criteria. The importance of the types of a link shall be covered in my next post about what determines the power of a link.
If you have gone through some SEO blogs like www.linksmanagement.com then I am sure you have formed an opinion that backlinks are important for ranking well on search engines. While that is true and is a good enough reason, that is not and should not be the ONLY goal of building links.
- Dofollow/ Nofollow links: This is the most important attribute of the link for SEO purposes. A no-follow link is the one where the webmaster is saying to the search engine that they are not vouching for the quality of the linked page. Nofollow links are found in the comments of the blogs, forum signature, many social bookmarking site, etc. No-follow links do not contribute to your search engine ranking. However, remember that search engine ranking is not the only goal of link building. Nofollow links can play a great role in getting targetted traffic to your blog.
- Internal Links/ External Links: Internal links are links from pages on the same domain. If you look at all the links in this post till now, they are links to other posts of bestlinkbuildingblog and hence they are internal links. External links are links from some other website. For example, look at my sidebar. There are a number of links to wordpress.org, feedburner.com, etc. Those links are external links for those websites.
Many SEO blogs and forums concentrate exclusively on external links. As a result, many webmasters spend hours trying to get a single external link while forgetting to link to their own blog posts from relevant pages. When I start talking about internal link ideas, I will show you how it is the most important aspect of ensuring proper distribution of link love.
- Editorial links/Links not in control of bloggers: Editorial links are the links that are provided to you from within the body of the article. The blogger/webmaster has linked to you because he thinks that your post will help his reader understand the concept better. So articles that I link from this article will be editorial links. Editorial links are the most valuable links as people link to only the best articles from their content.
On the other hand, there are many places from which you can get do-follow links yourself. However, the links are not given by the webmaster but rather it is given by the person who is getting linked. Links from do-follow blog comments, social bookmarking sites, free for all website directory, etc are links that are not in control of the webmaster.
- Sitewide links: These are the links that are present on each post of the blog. Again the links to feedburner or WordPress sites from the sidebar of this blog are an example of sitewide links. While sitewide links may look attractive as they increase the number of links to the site, search engines generally put very less value on such links.
The different types of links have different roles to play. Depending upon the goal of link building and stage of your blog, you should adopt a suitable approach. The importance of understanding this difference among the links will become clearer as I discuss the factors that determine the value of the link, link need of your blog and the importance of diversity in link building.
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