In the last few months we have talked a lot about what you can do internally to improve your sites ranking on the search engines. We looked at finding and using your keywords in the Page Titles, Page Content, Image Tags and using Proper Coding to up your sites rank.
There is another very important aspect of getting your site ranked high on the search engines: link building. This is the practice of obtaining or creating links on other web sites back to your site. There are a number of ways to go about this. Here are a few suggestions:
- Blogging – Set up a blog for your website and create keyword rich content which will be of interest to your clients and prospects. Then let the world know it’s there with ads, links from your site, links from your newsletter and RSS feeds. You can also connect your blog to your Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts and also set it up to automatically send out as a newsletter. All these would create links back to your website. You can learn more about blogging from these articles.
- Social media sites – Set up business accounts for your company on Facebook and LinkedIn. and keep them current by updating them with keyword rich information. Be sure to link your posts back relevant pages on your website.
- Write articles – Write and submit keyword rich articles to article directories like Ezine, www.goarticles.com or www.articlecity.com or use an article submission service such as SendArticles.
- Write press releases – Write and submit keyword rich press releases to sites like PRweb or PRlog.
- Buy links – Pay per click search results and services like Google Ads.
- Ask for links – Requesting links from other related sites is always suggested. Find sites which relate but don’t compete with your site and request a link. Some good sites include trade associations, clubs, directories, Chambers of Commerce, and sites about your product or service which do not themselves sell. The higher the ranking of such sites the better the affect a link will have on your site. Avoid sites which have no relation to yours, such as link farms, link exchanges which indiscriminately put you on any site no matter the content (you could end up being connected to porn.)
Summary:
Links into your site are vital. Some SEO gurus estimate they account for up to 80% of your Google ranking. How many links do you have now? You can easily check it on Google by searching “link:www.yourdomain.com”. Now that you have a number, get to work increasing it.
Here are some articles on link building which we hope you find useful: