3 Simple Link Building Tips For Any Website
Building links to your website is a vital element in any search engine optimisation strategy, but it can be time consuming and difficult to keep coming up with new ideas to build links to your website.
In a previous post, I discussed Yahoo Answers as a means to drive traffic and links to your website, in this article I will dig a little deeper into the process of gaining some back links.
Link Building Tips - Tip 1: Submit to Web Directories
There are hundreds of website directories on the internet, I won’t list them here because there is a website that has a list of free directories to submit to, and it is updated on a regular basis: addurl.nu
Submitting to the list of free directories alone won’t have much of an impact, I have compiled a list of a few directories (free and paid) below which I think you should submit to:
You can also visit “Best Web Directories” for an up to date list of quality directories.
As of late, Google has been cracking down on some web directories by penalising the site and devaluing their page rank. When considering if you should submit your website to a directory, follow a few simple rules:
- Search for the name of the directory on Google, if the domain name is nowhere to be found in the results then the directory has possibly been penalised.
- If the directory is mentioning terms like “SEO Friendly Directory” or “High Page Rank Directory” then I wouldn’t recommend adding your site.
- Check the page rank of the directory homepage, if it has no page rank then it’s either a new directory or Google has devalued the site, either way it’s not worth submitting your site.
Link Building Tips - Tip 2: Setup a Company Blog
Setting up a company blog that provides your users with the latest news within your company AND in depth information about your products/services is a brilliant way to build links. By doing this, you will build up a reputation as an expert within your industry subject.
You can write about your industry news, how to guides and reviews for your products. Writing content will add value to your website and give potential customers information they need. If you are struggling with ideas about what to write, look at your competitors on Google and find out what they are writing about.
You can submit your blog posts and articles to social networking sites, this will attract more traffic to your website and it has the potential to attract links. You can view a list of social networking sites at ebizmba.com
As discussed in a previous post “Generate Traffic and Links with Yahoo Answers”, you can use Yahoo Answers as a platform to market your content and articles and build up your reputation as an expert at the same time.
Setting up a blog is very easy these days, but what you want is a blog within your current website (the same domain). Attracting links to a blog within your current website will have a positive effect for the entire site. If you have a web developer working for your company, you can have them set up a Wordpress blog or you can call us and we can offer our advice (Contact us).
Link Building Tips - Tip 3: Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal linking is an important link building strategy as it can generate a lot of relevant and quality links. Reciprocal linking is the process of exchanging links with another website.
You don’t want to exchange links with any website on the internet, you need to find websites that are similar to yours in terms of the services they provide and the information on their website.
A quick and easy solution for finding other relevant websites is to get a list of your keywords you are targeting and carry out searches on Google for them. Then make a list of the top 10 results for each of your keyword searches and save them in a document.
With the list of websites you have, you can find the email address of the website administrator and send them a personalised email asking for an exchange of links. Try and avoid mass emailing multiple email addresses as most of those emails will just be deleted.
When you receive feedback from those emails, you can negotiate where you want your link to appear on their website and the anchor text.
If reciprocal linking sounds like hard work and time consuming, have your website administrator manage the work load, they probably don’t have enough work to do anyway :). An alternative is to use reciprocal link management software, this type of software will find other relevant websites on the internet, and once a link exchange has been accomplished, the software will check to see if the link on their website to your site is still active.
You can find reciprocal link management software by carrying out a search on Google for “reciprocal link manager”. I recommend using Internet Business Promoter, as it has a lot of other useful tools bundled into the software.
