Happy Valentine’s Day, Readers! In honour of this day for love, the Apollo Media team thought it would be great to write an article that defines this aptly named SEO term and explain why you shouldn’t wait for Valentine’s to send out your link love.

Link Love is the act of contextually linking to other websites or blogs. You see that hyperlink there? That’s an example of link love. Click on it and it will bring you to Blogossary, the blogophere’s dictionary blog and its definition of “Link Love”.

Most webmasters and bloggers naturally send out link love without even realizing it. There are many reasons to link to other sites but the two most common reasons are:

1. backup a point with a supporting source and
2. provide additional information on a subject

Basically, link love is necessary if you want to write valuable content for your readers. But of course, you want to give your readers the highest quality information. Most of your link love will link to reliable and authoritative sources.

This is one of the ways in which search engines judge the value of a website or blog. Search engines logically assume that if one site has lots of other webmasters and bloggers linking to it, then that site must have some important and meaningful information to share on the Internet.

Plus, linking drives traffic - did you click on the above link and visit Blogossary? Between the `inbound’ links and web traffic, link love (or link juice) is the single most important offsite search engine optimization there is in search marketing today. Even if your site lacks other organic SEO onsite optimization, enough link love will position your site/blog on the front pages of the most popular search engines.

So, wouldn’t it be in your favour if other websites linked to your website or blog? In effect, link love is saying, “We like what you’re publishing on the Net. We think it’s worthy enough to be shared with our readers.” It’s an honour to be link loved.

So, how do you get link love?

Our Senior Web Strategist here at Apollo, Darius Bashar, likes to say, “When you give link looove, you get link looove…as long as you don’t expect it in return.” (Yes, says it like it’s written!) For more practical tips on how to get link love, check out this great Problogger article, “The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love”.

They say that love makes the world go ‘round – it’s just as true (maybe even more so) on the Internet. So, on this very special day dedicated to love, why don’t you get into your website or blog and spread some link love around?

If you liked this article, bookmark it or vote for us on Digg! And return regularly to the Apollo Media blog so you can learn more about search engine optimization, social media marketing and grab a healthy dose of blogging tips.