The reading level for this article is Novice

Note: This is an excerpt from the 37-page “Building Thousands of Links to Your Web Site.” You may download the full ebook here.


1. The Basics of Linking

First, let me start with the very basics. I recognize that the majority of readers will be fairly adept at Internet browsing and the basics of web site development. If you are, feel free to skip to section three.

When I refer to "links" in the guide I simply mean other web sites that have put code on their site to enable their visitors to come directly to your site by clicking, either on an image or text.

Links can be to pages within the same site or to other web sites. When I refer to "building links" in this guide I will mean building incoming links to your web site from other web sites.

An example of a link could be.

Are you tired of all work and no play? It may be time for a vacation. Just imagine yourself in Greece, or Sicily, or Barcelona. Take a break from the grind and come learn about your next Mediterranean Vacation.

The link would be the blue underlined words. In a browser, clicking on these words would take you to the web site where you could learn about the vacation.

The link to our Mediterranean travel company may also be an image such as the one below.

Figure 1.1

Clicking on the image in a browser would take you to their fictional web site, relaxiva.com.

Within Hyper-text Markup Language (HTML), the basic web site programming language of the Internet, the coding to create a link is as follows.

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html">Words that will be linked</a>

If there was an image link, the code would be as follows

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html"><img src="image.gif"></a>

All right, now that we know the basics, let’s move on to learning why having incoming links is so important in the first place.

This Building Links article was written by Ryan P Allis on 3/1/2005

Ryan P. Allis, 20, is the author of Zero to One Million, a guide to building a company to $1 million in sales, and the founder of zeromillion.com. Ryan is also the CEO of Broadwick Corp., a provider of the permission-based email marketing software and CEO of Virante, Inc., a web marketing and search engine optimization firm. Ryan is an economics major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a Blanchard Scholar. [learn more.