Link Building For Your Website

[PaolaPe]

Link Building For Your Website

Probably no area of search marketing is more filled with controversy, scams, pitfalls, and nonsense, than the area of link building. It is indeed a minefield for the website owner. Because it is the cornerstone of how Google builds its search engine rankings, it is a vital topic. But it need not cause you to lose sleep. Here we will endeavor to calm your nerves, and give you some basic hints about building links to your website.

Link Building – A List of Don’ts.

1. Do not join a link exchange farm, scheme, club, ring, consortium, syndicate or fellowship. No matter what they say or what they call it, any scheme that automatically gives you tons of links (and requires you to link back) will damage your site in the search rankings, sooner or later. As you can tell from Google’s stock price, they are far from dumb. Links are the cornerstone of the Google ranking system. Try to abuse it (through link schemes) and they will eventually catch up with you. And when they do, your site will be penalized by lower rankings (and possibly dropped from the Google index entirely). Same goes for the other big two search engines, Yahoo! and MSN.

2. Do not believe you can get something for nothing in the area of links. If it sounds to good to be true, it certainly is, and it means you are about to get scammed. For details, see our post on internet scams.

3. Do not try to build your entire links campaign based on reciprocal (or exchanged) links. Here we are talking about the usual method of asking for a link exchange – you find a site you want a link from (you make sure it is relevant to your site) and you offer a link exchange. A handful of these are ok. Maybe 20% of your total links, in fact. But don’t make all your links reciprocal links. Remember that they are of increasingly less value. And do not spam webmasters by using software programs to shoot out thousands of emails at once. These programs are great for organizing your links campaign. But when you ask for a link, do it one link at a time.

4. Don’t get too heavy into paid text link ads. Again, a few are ok. But check out the vendor very thoroughly. Know where your ads will appear. And keep it to a small portion of your total campaign, because we know the big search engines are beginning to weight them less than before.

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Link Building – A List of Do’s.

1. Do build a great site, and keep giving your site visitors something of value to come back for. At the end of the day, this is what will build you a great inventory of in-bound links. You want other sites to link to you naturally. These are the one-way links that the search engines will reward. And if your site is not offering anything of value to visitors – change it! Otherwise, don’t expect good links and good traffic.

2. Do throw a little “link bait” on your site. “Link bait” is anything on your site (or in your online marketing) that attracts links. We know of an antiques website that placed some original educational material on their site, to get links from .edu’s. It worked. That’s link bait. The list of things that can serve as link bait is endless. Your job, as business owner or website owner, is to get creative with this one.

3. Do place your website in good directories, especially to jump start a new site. But don’t get carried away with it. It only goes so far. The Internet Search Engine Database is a great resource for directories. So is this list at WeBuildPages.com. Another source is Best Web Directories. And subscribe to The Link Spiel Blog to stay on top of this area.

4. Do get your website’s name out by doing some online promotion. You can use services such as PRWeb or Go Articles to publish your PR piece, and you can include in it a link back to your site. So when your article gets republished on another site, you get a link back.

5. And don’t forget to ask for links from websites maintained by trade associations, vendors, suppliers, alumni associations, chamber of commerce, local library, and so forth. The list can go on. Be creative, and just ask. Building good links is like putting money in the bank.

Source: www.smallbusinessonline.net

[linkmaster]

Hi There

I just wanted to expand a bit on the post above:

QUOTE(PaolaPe @ Oct 4 2006, 02:43 PM)

Probably no area of search marketing is more filled with controversy, scams, pitfalls, and nonsense, than the area of link building. It is indeed a minefield for the website owner. Because it is the cornerstone of how Google builds its search engine rankings, it is a vital topic. But it need not cause you to lose sleep. Here we will endeavor to calm your nerves, and give you some basic hints about building links to your website.

Google isn't the only one to use link popularity. In fact all the engines measure links as a way to determine a site's worth. However at this stage Google does it the "best" because it is more selective. That means when you are building links for Google you too have to be very selective. Many of the points listed in the Don'ts actually apply more to Google than any of the other engines currently.

4. Don’t get too heavy into paid text link ads. Again, a few are ok. But check out the vendor very thoroughly. Know where your ads will appear. And keep it to a small portion of your total campaign, because we know the big search engines are beginning to weight them less than before.

If you do decide to go the paid link route, consider using a vendor that doesn't publicly list their inventory. This is because if you can see it, so can the search engines. And if the search engines can see a site which sells paid links, what do you think they'd do about it?

Therefore if you do decide to buy links, make sure the firm you deal with does not list them publicly. Perhaps they have a secure area somewhere or an alternate URL you could visit which isn't readily accessible by the search engines.

3. Do place your website in good directories, especially to jump start a new site. But don’t get carried away with it. It only goes so far. The Internet Search Engine Database is a great resource for directories. So is this list at WeBuildPages.com. Another source is Best Web Directories. And subscribe to The Link Spiel Blog to stay on top of this area.

The only addition I'd make here is don't discount paid directories. Yahoo is one of the oldest trusted paid directories and some businesses have found that a paid listing at Business.com actually pays for itself in increased sales and referrals from Business.com.

In other words, don't just consider the link popularity factor when dealing with directories. While link pop is great, consider the potential clients you can gain from a well worded directory listing.

5. And don’t forget to ask for links from websites maintained by trade associations, vendors, suppliers, alumni associations, chamber of commerce, local library, and so forth. The list can go on. Be creative, and just ask. Building good links is like putting money in the bank.

Along this same line, consider asking for links from suppliers, customers, and anyone else you can think of in your industry. While local links are good, related links are also extremely helpful.

[thinkseo123]

I have always believed that link building servicesare among the basic yet most effective ways to gain popularity for your site and have higher page rank. There are plenty affordable link building offers online that we can avail but amazingly, anyone can do it by himself with correct knowledge of the process and its pros cons just like the ones presented here.

[stoneymontana]

Just throwing my 2 cents in,

In early 2007 all the search engines changed the way they look for site content and links. It used to be according to how many times a link came up through the sources mentioned above but not any more.
I'll explain, search engines now are programmed to search for relevance and if you are a shoe lace company and you have links on a computer hardware site the search engines arent going to look at that for ratings.
link exchanging however will work for you if you have do the program according to the criteria relevant to your website...shoelace.com would be great on a bunch of sites related to it such as websites that are selling shoes or info sites about shoes or sports sites since shoes is a popular part of sports. paid links are still a great way to make sure you get a certain amount of hits but now that the search engines are searching according to subject relevance it will do you more justice to work with the organic seo side of things. now organic seo only goes so far when you are targeting a world market but if you are targeting a local clientele then this is the best route for you and your clients will be more then satisfied with the results.

well i hope thhis helps..

regards,

Stoney

[w3bmaster]

For me linkbuilding is the most important thing in SEO (80% of evrything that needs to be done and the most poweerfull thing)

I have some tips i allways fololow
One wat links are the best (more poeefull then reciprocals)
Easy ways to get one way links
Free webdirectorys
Writing articles + submit them to article directorys
Or an hard wat Buy links Remember only from related sites

Reciprocals are olso great but not in a large amount and ONLY ONLY from related sites

Regards

[maria008]

Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing TO your site FROM other sites on the Web.
Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines.
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maria

Link Building

[JamesHarden]

Link building is en essential factor for getting top listed in major search engines....