Contextual Link Building

Contextual link building means gaining links to your website from related sites using related content and is one of the most powerful link building techniques that you can do right now. You see, Google likes relevant back links and scores them much higher than random ones, but Google also loves content. Contextual link building makes the most of these two facts to your advantage.

The simplest way to do effective contextual link building is to do article marketing. Most internet marketers have heard of article marketing but probably just thought that it was a way of gaining instant traffic from the article directories. In case you don’t know, article marketing simply involves writing small 250-500 word articles and incorporating links to your site with relevant anchor text onto the article. These articles are then distributed around the many article directories on the internet where they are published. The power of article marketing comes from the fact that many of these directories have high page rank – some as high as PR8 – and so the articles themselves rank well.

What many marketers don’t realise that the back links contained in the articles are scored very highly by Google, because they come from a high PR domain AND because the links are relevant in the context.

The same technique applies to blog posting. If you submit blog posts to relevant, high PR blogs the back links that you gain will be worth more than simply spamming those blogs with nonsense comments and dropping your link. Of course, if the comments or blog posts are relevant to the blog, then the owner will also be much more likely to approve them so the links will stick around for a lot longer.

Another great way to do contextual link building is, of course, to set up your own blog. Use the blog as a feeder site to your main money site, and write product reviews or related articles with keyword rich back links. You could also create some Web 2.0 properties, which are essentially mini websites, using related content and, again pointing back to your main site. Throw some social bookmarking, some RSS feeds into the mix and interlink all of your sites in a randomised structure and you have a very powerful link building process. These kinds of link building strategies have proven to be very powerful in recent years and while they require some work to set up, they benefit from the fact that the sites will stay around for a very long time as you own and control them. There is even software available nowadays to automate a lot of this process.

So, hopefully you now understand the importance and value of contextual link building. It’s more about linking smarter than linking more and should be a part of every successful marketer’s strategy.