Effective Link Building Strategies & Tips – Part I

Part I – What is link building on websites all about?

As I had said earlier, your overall goal should be to attract and drive specific traffic in order to get the most bang for your time and effort.

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In this Part One of five series we’re going to discuss 4 areas:

• Back Links
• Directories
• Reciprocal Links
• How to check for back links in my website
• How to check for “key” directories for my website

Back Links:

These are simply links to your website from other websites and in the process they bring “traffic.”  Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website, what we refer to as link popularity, as an extremely important factor when ranking your website.  You’ve heard of PageRank right?  Essentially this ranking system indicates the quantity and quality of incoming links.  But be very careful here!  Not just any kind of link is good for your website….in fact sometimes the wrong kind of link to your website can have negative repercussions on your website.

Directories:

In the back link section that we talked about above we hinted at good links and bad links to your website.  Submitting your website to “key” directories can get your website very quality type links.  Getting a link from a directory helps your ranking because it’s coming from a very strong link partner and it will drive traffic to your website as well.  The mistake that most clients make here is that they often times will submit their website to just about any directory on the planet.  Finding specific and key directories will help get the right kind of links and traffic to your website.  We’ll show you how to find key directories in another section below.

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Reciprocal Links:

The key to requesting reciprocal links is to find complimentary websites to your website and to make sure they are smaller websites that may consider linking to your website.  Clients sometimes try to go after very large websites that have an enormous amount of traffic.  Most of these webmasters either don’t have the time or really don’t have any incentive linking to a website that has less traffic.  Try concentrating on websites that have a similar amount of traffic that your website is getting.  An effective way to find similar website is to Google link exchange or value exchange services.  They’ll match your website with similar theme/topic content.

How to check for back links in my website:

There are primarily two ways you can check for back links to your website.  First, type this format for your individual website, link:domainname.com in a Google search engine.   Be careful that you do not put any spaces in it and make sure you put your correct extension.  For example if your domain name is a .net then replace .com with .net etc.  The second way to check for back links to your website is logging into your Webmaster Tools account within Google then access your Dashboard area and you will see a section labeled “links to your site.”