Linkbuilding For SEO Succcess
You may have heard that search engines like to see links and many of them to a website, it helps to indicate which sites the search engine should list, because a link to a site is a bit like a vote for a site. That’s a valid point as, spammers networks aside, websites do have a tendency to link most to other sites that have something of interest to the first sites readers.
If you are a small business owner with a website how do you go about building links to your website? There are several ways to get links but first it is important to understand that not all links are the same, some are much more powerful than others. A single link from just one authority site can be worth hundreds of links from other.
The best links to get are links that are composed of your target keywords as the anchor text (the clickable words on the other site) and that also come from sites that are relevant to your business or that are powerful for other reasons. (A link from The NY Times to your book-keeping website would be choice even if it is not related to your business!)
More good ways to get links to your website:
Firstly, you need to have decent content, whether this be in a blog or traditional style website, give other website owners something good to link to then promote it:
- Give it a mention in your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc accounts.
- Leave links where appropriate in relevant forums and comment in blogs that allow it.
- Bookmark your content at social sites like Delicious and Digg.
- Submit a shorter version of it to sites like GoArticles or Ezinearticles (with a link to the main article on your site).
- Blog it anywhere you got a blog.
Try to get your suppliers to link to your site or get links from professional associations.
See if you ca do a deal with a similar service in another city, a mention and link to them from a blog article of yours in return for a similar mention from them of your website.
Find out who links to your competitors and try to get links from those sites too. You can check your competitor links by typing the following string into your browser location bar:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:somedomain.com%20-site:somedomain.com
Remember to replace the two ‘somedomain.com’ bits in there with the domain you are examining.
Are there directories that specialize in your particular field? Prominent blog writers? - Try to get links from them or a product review (with a link to your site obviously).
See if you can guest post in those industry blogs with a link or two to your site of course.
Often even unrelated websites are useful, local directories help to raise your profile locally and have a little link juice and they are good citation references if you are hoping to get a Google Local Business listing (more about that another time…).
Why not write an article relevant to your industry and publish it on article directories or social sites like Hubpages.com. Do remember include a link back to your site of course! Better still, write a few articles and spread them around several article directories like Goarticles.com and Ezinearticles.com and some social sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. Interlink them a little and have links from all or most to your main site.
Got a blog section with an RSS feed on your site? Add the RSS feed to the various RSS distribution services like feedage.com and feedagg.com.
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