A Practical Guide to Link Building

Building links to your web site is a key task when promoting your online presence and you cannot expect to thrive in the virtual internet community without good quality, relevant links to your site.  Links to your site help generate traffic in two key ways, firstly by attracting traffic that clicks on the link and is carried through to your site and more importantly, indirectly by getting you a higher rank with the search engines.  Search engine ranking is determined by a number of factors and the number of links pointing to your web site is one of the top two methods of achieving a high ranking with interesting SEO optimised content being the other.

While this is simply restating what has been written about by the bucket load,  how to go about finding good link partners and completing the process is a topic upon which a deafening silence falls.

What Are We Looking For?

Sites that you are looking for to create inbound links for your own site need to be:

• from web pages that are relevant to your web pages
• should contain keywords and phrases which your own web site is looking to rank highly for
• should not have the same link text as other inbound links – this replication of the same link text does you no good with the search engines
• should have varied but relevant link text to show the search engines that your site does in fact have content that is relevant and worth ranking

The key thing to bear in mind is that quality by far beats quantity so concentrate your efforts and don’t just link with anything.

Inbound Links Come in Different Flavours

Having different types of inbound links is thought to be a good idea though we don’t know for sure because the search engines do not tell us what they are looking for exactly so it’s hit and miss.

Common types of inbound links include:

• links that have been obtained in exchange for a link from your site
• links from users who find your site interesting
• links from internet directories such as DMOZ
• links created by including them in articles, Press Releases and blogs that you may or may not have a hand in producing.

How Do We Find Sites That Will Link to Us?

The inexpensive way to find sites that are relevant and will link to you is to look within your own business sector.  That may seem strange as why would one of your competitors consider sending traffic to you?  The answer is simple, as though you are in the same business you may in fact not be competing directly.  Someone selling widgets in John O’Groats can safely refer traffic to a widget supplier in Lands End with no loss of business to themselves.  That would constitute a good inbound link and you can easily find dozens of potential link partners in this way.

Another tack to explore is by looking at providers of complimentary but non-competing products in your own area as well as more widely.  A mortgage broker linking with an estate agent makes good sense and also would constitute a good inbound link.

These methods require no expense except some time on your part, but there are service providers who can take the sting out of all of this for a moderate fee and who use professional SEO software to manage link building campaigns.  We’ll continue to focus here though on cost effective link building i.e. free.

We’ve Found a Site We’d Like to Have Link to Us.  Now what?

First check to see if they have a “link page” which will tell you how to go about asking for a link. If they have a link page then follow those instructions.  If there isn’t a link page then you will need to contact the webmaster with the request and how you want the link to be set up.

You can email any webmaster simply by using “webmaster@thesite.co.uk” and that should get through and place “Link Request” or similar in the subject header.  Better still, do a little digging to find out who is behind the site and again this is not a big issue.  I use www.dnsstuff.com as this will give you an email address and a named contact for whoever administers the web site and possibly you will also find the owner of the site and their email too.

Experience has shown that when emailing a webmaster for a link, following some basic rules will help you get a positive response:

• Do not ask too much of the webmaster and remember you are the one asking for the link not the other way around;
• Don’t teach Granny to suck eggs by telling them all about SEO – they probably already know why you’re asking for the link;
• Keep your email short;
• Don’t bother webmasters if the site has no relevance to yours;
• Provide a link to their site first and tell them you’ve done it with a hyperlink to show it;
• Be polite;
• Offer an incentive if they link to you such as a blog post reviewing their product or service offering; and
• Include your contact information including a telephone number as well as your email, and try not to use a free email account such as hotmail – it makes you look like a spammer.

Guaranteed to have your link request rejected is emailing the webmaster a couple of days later asking why they haven’t set the link up yet.  Don’t!  Leave it about a month and then drop them another email and I find that bringing to their attention something on your own web site that may be of interest tends to elicit a response.  Tact and diplomacy are the way forward in these instances.

While You Are looking for Link Partners Others Will Be Looking for You

I’ve already mentioned that you should check a possible link partner website for a link page with instructions on how to ask them for a link.  It’s easy to do and simplifies the whole process so why don’t you set one up for your own website?

Cheap and easy to arrange and if you want inbound links it makes sense  to simplify the process for link partners.  Provide clear instructions on what needs to be done together with a contact email for the webmaster or whoever will make the decision.

The Holy Grail – Links from Higher Ranking Sites Than Mine

This is not as hard as you might think!

You are looking for sites that will link to you and who enjoy high ranking because this makes them more authoritative as far as the search engines are concerned.  Such links provide you with a greater boost in search engine ranking as well.  Getting a link with them may be as simple as following the process outlined already but there are other ways you can get links from higher ranking sites.

Take a look at these two sites – www.Zimbio.com and www.Squidoo.com – both have very good rankings and are considered authoritative by the search engines.  Both also allow you to post articles and blog style posts on their sites with links back to your own web pages as well as the ability to leave comments that also include linkbacks to your web pages.  These count as inbound links that are one-way and count towards your link rating as well as being completely free.

Using Press Releases with links to your web pages achieves the result in a similar fashion and taking it further with social bookmarking sites such as reddit.com, del.icio.us, MySpace and Technorati.  These sites are all high ranking and provide numerous opportunities for growing your links.  You can establish a blog off your main site which covers what you do and every post is linked back to your web pages where relevant and appropriate but it may take some time to gain a high rank on it’s own account.  That does not mean you cannot find a high ranking blog and ask them to feature your business or products and in some cases, a blogger may actually do so for a fee.

Leaving comments on other peoples posts and articles is an excellent way of driving traffic to your web pages and it is easy to find a relevant topic thread that dovetails with your own business.  Using this practice of linkbaiting to place flattering comments on someone else’s work is a sure fire method of getting the attention of the writer and who knows, maybe they’ll feature you in their next post or article.  This may sound corny but it works and it’s how it gets done in the real world.

Summary

Link building is not something that can be just done overnight.  It takes time to build up good links and it takes planning and preparation to maximise the benefits from gaining relevant links.  Don’t go for quantity with your links, instead go for quality links to sites that are relevant to your own.  Manage your link building efforts and get yourself organised in terms of how you perform link building and following up link requests. 

We’ve covered some of the common methods for building links but there are many more techniques that can be used.  These methods as described here do not cost you money but there are many SEO service providers who do this on a professional basis and can achieve impressive results but you must manage them carefully.

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