Is link building in any form worth while, or is it a waste of time? Do links benefit your web site and push you up the results, or is it all one big myth? Have a look at my experiment results!

I have of late been carrying out a few experiments with link building to see what the effects are. I am part way through the entire test, which aims to find out if too many links can equally destroy the good work. But I am noticing several interesting results.

For my test I picked on a new site of my own that included a claim phrase from a paid to post system. This claim phrase is a random group of words that is just found on web-sites trying to become members of the system, so it is very unlikely that anyone else on the internet is running any SEO on it.

My blog, at the outset of the experiment, was 35th in the Google search results for this claim phrase and nowhere to be found on Bing or Yahoo. I used the phrase as the anchor text for a link to the post page from a PR3 site that I also control.

Give it a week and Google has been all more than the PR3 website. Funnily, this site is suddenly 12th on the results. At first, the blog moved up from 35th to 15th and then 10th, finally stepping above my PR3 site.

So through a single link on a PR3 page, my site jumped 2 full pages for this totally uncontested phrase on Google. It hadn’t moved a single place until the day I saw that the PR3 website had been revisited by Google. So, the merely explanation for the jump of 25 positions is this new found link to it.

But, it is also interesting to note Bing and Yahoo. Neither had the post page listed in the search results prior to the link going live. Yahoo did quite quickly collection the PR3 site with the collection on it for the search terms, which was quite promising, but it took a few more days until it also listed the post, down on the bottom of page 4.

The interesting difference between Google, Bing and Yahoo is the number of results each return. Bing and Yahoo return 30 – 40 results on this search yet exactly the same search on Google returns almost 800 existing results.

It appears that Google is being less fussy about what pages it caches and lists in the search engines. And when looking at how numerous pages of the website that Yahoo has indexed, they are nigh on all category and archive pages. There is only one post page listed in the archives – the one in this testing.

So, it looks as although because of one PR3 page pointing to the post, Google has promoted the website from 35th to 10th and Yahoo has taken an interest in the page and also cached it and listed it well. Bing though, is only being slow (it hasn’t visited the PR3 page for a few time).

Therefore, inbound links are beyond doubt the lifeblood of a web site. They do move you up the results and make search engines take notice of the pages. Next, I’ll test whether a web site wide link destroys the position or aids it!

Most of the weight as to what terms are significant to your site come not from what you say on your website pages, but what other websites say around you. And this is by how they link to you.

Each link has what is called an anchor text – this is the piece of text that the visitor will click on to use the link. But the search engines take a look at this anchor and use it as a vote for the website. So, if the anchor text is “search engine tips” then you have 1 vote for that term pointing to your website. Get an adequate amount of votes and you will be top of the collection.

Historically, website owners have done this by running link exchange sites on their websites. Mass exchanges, where you link to another website in return for them linking to you. This was fine, but as with the content issue, everything to optimse a website needs to shout out ‘natural’. Search engines can simply spot huge directories and most have no page rank and are useless.

So, we need a way of link building that gives natural links, ideally from web sites that we are not enforced to link to in order to keep the link back in place. And the remedy to this is article writing. I’ll look at how and the other reasons later in the article.

So filling meta data and tags with keywords is old hat and link sites are out of the window because they have no value. But we need links and to do that we write articles. But, what is so good round article writing? Article writing certainly does get sites to the top of search engine rankings, but that is only one part of the story.

For numerous web-sites, there is a market of potential customers that spread far and wide and some of these are researching more information by reading article directories. Others might be looking for offerings and services and will stumble onto articles on sites.

Either group, if interested in the article, could then see the author’s biography at the end of the article and then visit the author’s web site. With one recent brand new website, before it had even been cached by the search engines, I managed to get it up to 40 new unique traffic per day, merely through people reading a few articles on 1 top article directory.

Also, given that a chief incentive for writing articles is the search engine benefit, the plusses go on. Not only does the article get printed on the directory that you submit it to, but other sites and websites will pick up the article, print it and link back to you.

So, we write articles for 2 reasons. First they are amazing with the search engines and boost our ranking position and second people will read them on the sites we submit them to and visit our websites. But how do we write them?