Link Building

This article discusses the importance of link building and building inbound links to your website.

Building incoming links is one of the most important things you do to move up in the search engines. Next to creating great content, incoming links is one of the most valued factors that Google and other search engines use to determine the value of your page and whether to include it in the first few pages of search results. The message here is that link building is critical to the success of your website!

While reciprocal links are okay, the search engines value one-way links to your site form other well respected and high ranking sites more favorably.

Valued Credible High Ranking Websites

One of the most important off-page criteria that search engines use is how many "important" websites link to your site. "Important" websites are sites with high page rankings and traffic counts as opposed to link farms or sites that are simply hundreds of links to different websites.

Valued credible websites include sites such as:

• A directory like Yahoo or DMOZ
• A site with a high Google Page Rank
• An educational institution with a .edu domain such as Stanford.edu or Duke.edu
• A specialty directory

More Strategies for Building Links

Deciding on a link building strategy and following it on a regular basis will have a significant impact on your ability to get your site up in the search results. So why would another webmaster want to link to your website?

Content, Content, Content

This may seem obvious, but the very first and most important strategy is to create fantastic content. Make your site so good and valuable that those who have an interest in the same topic will want to link to your site to provide more value to their own website visitors. This concept seems quite simple, but is ignored by many webmasters and site authors. Great content will attract great traffic!

Focus on the content and creating a great online resource and experience for your site visitors and they will keep coming back. They will also share information and links about your website with their friends and colleagues which will lead to more traffic for your site and inbound links from other websites.

 

Article Marketing

Writing articles related to the content of your website and submitting them to article directories is a credible way to promote your website and to build inbound links. When you post a helpful article to these directories, other webmasters may choose to include your article on their website. The signature information or biographical paragraph about you, the author, will include information about your website and a link. Because search engines don't like duplicate content, it is best to not include your articles on your own website.

Using Pay For Services for Building Links

There is software available for running a link building campaign or you can pay contractors or hire services that will have people visit related discussion boards and forums and post information and links to your website.

Internal Linking

Internal links are links within your website and help with search engine optimization in a couple of ways. First, the provide the ability of search engine spiders to find new content on your site. When you add new pages to your website, always create internal links from other pages to the new material. The search engine spiders will follow those links, find the new pages and add them to their index.

Internal links also have the ability to create buckets of related content that become a credible resource or authority on the topic.

Internal link building is an easy and effective strategy for helping the search engines to better understand and index your pages. Doing this in an organized and well structured site plan with links across your site to tier 2 and tier 3 pages helps to create a web links to all of the content on your site. This can be done through site maps and sub-menus in related areas of your site, but the most effective internal links are those that are blended seamlessly within the text of an article.

Seek Out Links from .gov and .edu Websites

Government and educational websites are deemed valuable and credible by the search engines. If your content fits, then purposely going after links from government and college websites will impact your search engine results. A dedicated campaign to garner these kinds of links is a good use of time and resources.

Social Media Links

Promoting your website via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter is gaining in popularity and presents a way for webmasters to build networks and buzz about their website as social media users share quality sites with their friends. The key is to have a quality site to share which goes back to the first strategy... focus on creating great content, content, content!

More Articles on Marketing Your Website

• Link Building
• Link Building with Squidoo
• Internet Link Building
• Website Marketing Strategies

 

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