Link Building

In my last post I covered the “art of link building” and the importance of having inbound links to your website, and to a lesser extent outbound links. I also covered many issues you may face when building links, in this post I will cover the reasons why inbound links are important and some ways to go about getting those links.

What links can do for you

Your website represents you and your business online, and it can serve many purposes  including being  your online business card, a brochure that introduces visitors to your business. It may also contain sales literature, and showcase the products / services you offer. You should also use your website as a place to showoff your expertise in your niche. In short you should make sure that your website offers quality original content that your visitors will find interesting and want to visit again, if they like it enough they may also spread the good word about your website to others. Besides for providing this great content you will have to somehow let the world know about it or you will never get traffic to your site.
This is where the link building comes in, as it’s a very important way of spreading the word about your site. Your business’ website is likely to be one of your most valuable assets, so you should dedicate some time to link building and build up your online reputation, which will translate into more conversions. Just be patient about it as link building doesn’t build up your site overnight, rather it’s a long continuous process, but make no mistake if you make a serious commitment to link building good things will start coming your way (remember the tortoise and the hare story).

How can I get quality inbound links?

This is no easy task to accomplish, in fact it’s a lot of hard work to get valuable links from trusted authority sites. Even though it’s quite a challenging task to accomplish it’s not an impossible task to complete, being this is a challenging task is good because it helps allow the cream rise to the top so to speak. To start out with this task you will need something of value (your content) to earn these inbound links; refer to my post content is king for more information about what is quality content.
By generating this high quality content on to your webpage’s you will already have completed one important task in this whole process. This type of content will naturally  attract visitors because it is of use to them, and as a result of this you will automatically acquire backlinks to your site from these visitors. So keep focused on creating that same great content and you will keep acquiring those great inbound links.

Not all inbound links are created equally

One of your main goals when it comes to acquiring inbound links should be getting them from site that are relevant to your and they should also be of high quality. For instance if you are running a site that is dedicated to snowboarding, and you acquire a link from a site that is dedicated to underwater basket weaving, the visitors from that site will have no interest in your site. If such a site does link to yours the page the link is on should make a valid case for linking to your site (it should be relevant). Otherwise the link will be of minimal value and if it is determined that the intentions of the link were manipulative it may even lead to penalties for your site. This is due to so many sites being setup solely as link exchanges in an effort to manipulate webpage rankings, these sites are usually considered junk and do nothing to help there visitors. Search engines can tell what type of content on different webpage’s are related and thus if the content on two different webpage’s is clearly different the link between them is disregarded and worthless and like I mentioned before it could lead to your website being penalized.

So where can I get valuable links?

Well as I have mentioned before you should start by finding sites that are relevant and related to yours. Some other considerations you should take when searching for inbound links is weather the site is an authoritative site in the field, if it is this would be a good site to get a link from. So you will be able to differentiate between a worthy web site and not so worthy site, make sure that it possess’ quality content, and that it has a good history in this niche, also check to see if it has earned a lot of relevant inbound links. By choosing a site like this to get a link from will carry a lot more weight and take you a lot farther than a ton of links from junk sites (this is because sites like this will not be giving links out to just any site out there). There are many factors that will help you earn such a reputation, but having quality links from authoritative sources like these websites will help your site greatly when it comes to your search engine rankings.

Link building trickery

This is where a webmaster tries to gain rank in the search engines by manipulating the search engines algorithms. While this may work to increase the sites ranking, the search engines will eventually find out what is being done and the website will most likely end up paying dearly for it (maybe even being removed from the index completely). Some examples of this would be:

• Using hidden links and or text on your pages
• Linking to known junk websites
• Many links coming from irrelevant sites, blog comments, etc
• The number of backlinks increasing significantly in a short period of time
• Getting backlinks from link exchanges, paid link farms, or bad neighborhoods

Getting quality inbound links for your website

So now that you have great content on your website you will have to let the world know about it, the age old “build it and they will come” doesn’t really apply here. You will have to go out and spread the word about your great website, eventually if others find your page valuable they will start helping in spread the word too, but you will have to start the whole thing off.
So I have all this great content that will be helpful to my visitors and the webmasters of relevant websites will want to link to my site to help their visitors out. Well lets get this train rolling, here’s a few ways to start:

• Write and publish to online article directories
• Create and release press releases about significant advancements changes in your website/business
• Create an email newsletter that your visitors can subscribe too
• Use social media sites to help connect your business to others
• Actively participate in relevant blogs and forums to spread the word about your site (don’t spam though)

There are many other ways to go about link building, I will work on compiling a list of tips for a later post.

When starting out, remember to only set a pace that you will be able to easily keep over time. Don’t start out hard charging and then fizzle down on your delivery of content later on, this will quickly kill everything you had going. So before you start out you may want to sit down and think about how much content you will be able to develop and put out on a regular basis, this fresh content is what will keep your visitors coming back time after time.

Related posts:

1. The Art of Link Building