We’re constantly told how important link building is but very few of us understand how to actually build quality links to our websites. Here are five simple link building strategies you can implement today:
Link Building Explained
Search Engines rank websites according to two broad factors - on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors relate to your website itself. If you’ve done your keyword analysis, your site is well coded, well structured and has lots of relevant content on it then you have the building blocks in place to be a hit with the search engines. Crucially though, getting these on-page factors right is not enough to get first page rankings. To achieve this you also need to work on your off-page factors – these relate to building a stream of quality links to your site.Search engines see any link that comes to you from an external website as a vote. Put simply, the more votes you get then the higher up you go in the search engines. If you’re lucky enough to have a website that is already a huge hit or has lots of people talking then you’ll naturally have many people linking to it as they suggest your website to others across the web. However most of us aren’t that lucky and so we have to work at it.
It is also worth noting that the internet is not a true democracy. Some votes from highly ranked, reputable websites are given a much heavier weighting than others coming from lower ranked websites. In addition, having too many links from low ranked websites can begin to have a negative impact on your sites ranking.
How do I know if Websites are Highly Ranked?
This is actually fairly simple. Search Engines assign a Page Rank to websites, which is a number from 0 to 10 – the higher the number, then the higher the ranking of that site, and the more benefit you will get if that site links to yours. Reputable, high traffic websites such as the BBC News site have very highly rated Page Rank ratings but, lets face it, it’s not going to be easy to convince the BBC to link to your site (although not impossible)! Equally, many directories that are purely set up to provide free back links for websites have a low Page Rank and can often be seen as ‘link farming’ websites, which are viewed negatively by Search Engines.*There are many free page rank checking tools you can use to identify the Page Rank of websites you’re thinking of linking to.
So what you want to do is build a mix of links to your site with links from moderately and highly ranked websites. But what is actually involved in building quality back links? Below are five simple link-building strategies that will begin to help you understand how it’s done.
Strategy 1: Commenting on Relevant Industry Blogs
Search engines love blogs, and by posting your link on highly ranked blogs you will get instant SEO benefit (without a huge amount of effort involved). To create back-links on blogs, you should:- Identify blogs that have a high Page Rank, are relevant to your industry and provide ‘do follow’ links (these are the type of blogs where a link to your website will be counted as a vote).
- Take the time to read the posts on each blog you’ve identified and find a post you feel knowledgeable enough about to make a relevant comment related to the subject matter of the post.
- In your comment include a link with relevant anchor text such as your keyword. You can include your link within the website URL form box as well as within the comment itself (if allowed). When creating a back-link, ensure you use anchor text to describe the website you are directing people to. To do this, you need to include a bit of HTML code to create your back-link in with anchor text:
<a href=http://www.yourwebsitesite.com>type keyword here</a>
- Repeat this process on an ongoing basis on many different industry blogs.
Strategy 2: Identifying Reputable Directory Back-links
Directory submissions are the most well-known and practiced form of link building for those looking to quickly increase their search engine ranking. That’s because, although fairly tedious, submitting to directories is simple and doesn’t involve much thinking! Directory submissions can be part of an effective link building campaign but there is one thing to keep in mind when using them:Search engines don’t like to see an instant flood of irrelevant links pointing to your website and prefer to see a pattern of increased links over an extended period of time. Always select a relevant industry category to place your website listing in and use targeted keyphrases in both your title and description.
Strategy 3: Social Bookmarking Links
Social Bookmarking communities are essentially websites that allow users categorise and recommend sites to the community that they like or have found useful information on. Social Bookmarking websites generate millions of daily traffic so they provide great SEO benefit as well as driving some of that traffic directly to your site. Social Bookmark communities such as Digg and Technorati allow you to quickly generate great quality links from high Page Rank and high authority websites.Here’s how to create linking opportunities from Social Bookmarking sites:
- Register for a free account on each bookmarking website site making sure to include your website URL and description of your business with keywords when creating your profile.
- Create a system to organize the web pages you want to bookmark. One way of doing this is to create a ‘Bookmarks’ folder within your web browser toolbar.
- Create a folder for every day of the week, so that you can easily submit your links to the top bookmarking websites regularly, without posting to the same site twice in any given day. (This is something you REALLY want to avoid!).
- To start you off add between 5-10 bookmark sites into each of your bookmarks and then each day, load up these websites and submit your website as a new bookmark.
Below are some of the most popular Social Bookmarking networks to get you started:
Digg
SlashDot
Technorati
Furl
Mixx
Strategy 4: Become an Article Marketer
Article marketing is one of the best ways to generate a high amount of quality links to your site relatively quickly. To become an article marketer you’ll need a base of around 12-15 original articles that include your keywords within the title and body of the article itself. Each article should be around 350-400 words in length. Articles should be completely original and high quality so focus on writing about a subject you know lots about (probably something related to the industry you work in) If you already have a blog then the good news is that you can use previous posts as a starting point for you articles.
Start by submitting your articles into the most popular directories. First submit your article to Ezine (the largest of these sites) and, after waiting for 24 hours, also submit your articles into the other highly ranked article-based directories.
When registering for each article directory you’ll be asked to create an author resource box. This resource box is where you tell the reader about the author (you!) and the box is tagged at the bottom of any article you have written. You are allowed to create links with your keywords in the author resource box and this is often the only place where a back-linking is permitted, so make sure you spend the time on creating your resource box.
Here are the top article directories that you should focus on submitting content to:
ArticlesBase
Buzzle
GoArticles
ArticlesFactory
ArticleSnatch
WebProNews
ArticleDashboard
SubmitYourNewArticle
Strategy 5: A Shameless Plug…
You know a shameless plug for our link building services is coming here but actually there’s very good reason to outsource your link building campaigns to an external company. Link building is not a difficult task but it is a time consuming one. Companies who specialise in online marketing and link building are set up to run multiple link building campaigns at one time and they have processes to be able to do what you could achieve at a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. That said, you CAN run a successful link building campaign without any professional external help. Hopefully what I have given you today are some ideas and tips to get started.
Good luck and if you liked this article why not link to it?!
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