Link Building benefits for your business

The definitive link building strategy

What is link building about and where should you put your efforts for maximum return? Strategic link building is about establishing your competitive position in the online marketplace that already exists, albeit informally around your industry sector.

Link building is not about search engine optimisation, it's not about boosting your Google PageRank, it's not about publishing a link directory and it's not about swapping links with as many other websites as possible.

If you've gone through all the hard work of a link building campaign, you expect to be rewarded with some impressive links. The reality is that many people are disappointed with the trickle of links and the trickle of traffic that their efforts produce. If that sounds familiar to you, then you need to step back a bit and re-access your linking strategy. Are you really giving enough thought to your strategy?
How do you define the online marketplace?

When potential customers look for an answer to their problem, they'll do a search on Google, they'll scan directories, read articles and product reviews, lurk on discussion groups and evaluate competitors.

The sites that your potential customers use to do this make up the online marketplace around your industry. These are the sites you need to be on and your linking strategy must get you there.

An effective link building strategy is not, “I'm looking for 50 links from websites with a minimum Page Rank of 5” but rather, “I want 50 links from the most important information websites that my customers and potential customers regularly use.”
1. Understand your marketplace

What market sectors do you really service? How do these different sectors rank in terms of importance to your business?

You may think you're selling to ‘the technology market’ and you may look for relevant technology portals like TechWeb1 - but what significant niches exist within that market? Suppose education is an important sector for your technology business, then you'd want to look for an education portal that concentrates on technology - for example, Syllabus.com2.

Such niche websites can be ignored by competitors yet can produce great business for the savvy link builder. You should typically look for between 3-6 significant niches from which to generate links. From those, build a minimum target list of 250 important sites and concentrate your efforts on these top 250 sites.
2. Develop good content

There's no substitute for good content. It's content that customers look for, content that gets you up the search engine rankings and content that encourages others sites to link to yours.

But don't publish content just for the sake of having something for search engines to index. Every piece of content on your site should be there for a purpose - it must support your sales proposition and take your customers a little further along the sales cycle.
3. Make sure your content is well written

You copy needs to be well written and needs to be accessible to search engines. That means being aware of the words that people will use looking for your products and incorporating those words into your titles and descriptions, headings and subheadings, and of course in your linking text.

If you haven't got the time or ability to write well, then get someone who can - they'll be worth their weight in gold! You can find good quality freelance writers at Guru.com3 or in the UK, Holdthefrontpage.co.uk4.
4. Look at media sites

Media sites have large audiences of people looking for information - get coverage and a link to your site and not only will you get a significant spike in traffic to your site, but you'll also get a percentage of that audience linking to you because the media site did. Links attract links.

So once you've identified your market sectors, and collated your list of 250 link targets, separate the high profile portals or information sites from the rest of the list and start with them. That's right - at the top! See if any of the portals have a ‘submit an article’ or ‘write for us’ page. If they do, make sure you use it - it's an easy and valuable way to get coverage and links for your business.

For media sites whether they're traditional or purely online, look for reporter bylines and look for contact details. Many sites will publish guidelines on how to submit a release.
5. Issuing online press releases
Online poll

* Which describes your use of local government (council) websites?
o Never used them
o Used occasionally to find information
o Used often for information only
o Used, would consider making transactions †
o Used for information & transactions †
*

†Transactions include paying parking fines, making an application etc.

(Submit your answer and we'll show you the results so far)

Approaching media sites above is very much a one-to-one approach where personal contact is essential. Issuing online press releases is more of a one-to-many approach.

You submit your release to a newswire and they distribute your news to thousands of journalists and editors on their database. Such releases can be picked up and covered by both national and local media and are certainly worth doing - but not as a substitute for the one-to-one approach described above. Try PR Web5 or in the UK, Sourcewire6.

But perhaps the best way of getting media coverage quickly is to use the knowledge, experience and contacts collected by others. Eric Ward's URL Wire7 service is the best I've seen. Through many years of online promotion for clients, Ward has built an impressive opt-in list of over 19,000 journalists, website reviewers and writers.

Eric's contacts include some of the most influential on the web - from the Yahoo Picks editors to Sam Meddis, the creator of USA Today Hot Sites. If you're launching a quality website or publishing quality content, you should give URL Wire7 some serious consideration.
6. Move on to non-media sites

Now move on to the non-media sites left from your top 250. Any editorial coverage or links that you've already gained will help your cause. Other sites will be more likely to link to you if you have been mentioned by an editorial site they respect.

Many of these sites may give you one way links, others will ask for a reciprocal link. Because you're asking only top sites, then it makes sense to agree.

But instead of burying a link to them in some remote links directory, include them in your content, write a short article little about them, even recommend them if they have something useful to offer your visitors.
7. Monitor and evaluate

At the start of this article, I said that link building was not about the number of links you could get. Likewise monitoring and evaluating is not simply a matter of counting how many links you manage to get. What is really worth measuring is the benefit those links bring your business.

So as a minimum you should measure:

* How much increased traffic comes from links
* Which links bring the most traffic
* How much does your search engine traffic
* How much your sales increase as a result.

A final word...

And finally a quotation from Sun Tzu [Wu] (BC 535 - 228) courtesy of Quote Sayings8:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

This article was written by Ken McGaffin. Ken is author of The Linking Matters Report and provides training and consultancy in link building9 and online marketing9.
What next?

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* Get our accessible and usable CMS15 so your site offers outstanding accessibility
* Attend one of our 6 interactive usability & accessibility training courses16

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Common terms used when discussing Link Building

As with any language, one needs to learn it one word at a time. With the rapid growth of the Internet, a whole new set of terms and definitions have arisen. To be successful, a webmaster needs to be able to speak the "language." Below is a listing of some of the major terms and definitions used when describing the process and important of link building.

Search Engine: An computerized index of the web pages; creating a searchable database. Example are AltaVista, Google

Directory: An index of web pages, compiled by people and organized more by topic or theme. Examples are Yahoo, About.

Pay Per Click Search Engine: A search engine in which the ranking of the sites is determined by the amount paid for each click from that search engine to the site.

Portal:Are basically directories, many have added features such as news, browser based email, online calendars and reminders, fax services, and chats and discussion forums.

Vortal: Is simply a portal centered around a specific issue.

Search Engine Placement/Optimization/Positioning: The work of trying to ensure that a website ranks high in the search engines.

Meta Description Tag: The tag present in the header of a web page which is used to provide a short description of the contents of the page.

Meta Keywords Tag: The tag present in the header of a web page which lists words which represent the content in the body of the page.

Keyword: A word or phrase which is used when searching for a website in the search engines or directories. It is these words or phrases that webmaster use when describing or explaining the content of their website.

Keyword Density: Represents the frequency these keyword words appear in a page or in an area of a page. It is a critical issue for search engine ranking-the more often the keyword or phrase appears in a page, the higher its search engine ranking. If repeated too often though, it could lead to the page being penalized for spamming.

Spamming: It is a procedure of abusing the normal search engine ranking techniques, such as using hidden text, excessive repetition of a keyword, etc. This term is also used when describing the practice of sending unsolicited bulk email.

Link Popularity: The number of sites which link to a particular site. Many search engines use link popularity as a factor in determining the search engine ranking of a website.

Reciprocal links/link exchanges: The process where two webmasters agree to show the other's link on their website.

Link Building: The process of creating inbound links to owns website. This can be done reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc.

Link Exchange Program:There are many variations but most normally refers to a sign-up program where webmasters agree to host and link to a members-only links page.

Link Farm: A recent term used to describe some link exchange programs. These programs are nothing more than random links on a page and really do not help one popularity. Can be considered spamming.

Link Management:The process of organizing and maintaining a website's reciprocal links. Normally a paid service. LinksManager and Links4Trade are two examples.

-Larry Sullivan
Linking101.com

Larry is the owner and webmaster behind Linking101, is a website dedicated to assisting webmasters find information, resources, and a better understanding on the power link popularity and link exchanges wield. Linking101.com has a free opt-in newsletter, product reviews, articles, and its own unique custom link products to help give you the edge you need.

Link building
What is Link Popularity?
Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing TO your site FROM other sites on the Web.
Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines

We specialize in placing text link ads on high quality websites
Our text link ads are unique because they are a direct source of targeted traffic and can raise your natural search engine rankings.
Read more: link building services

Building links through reciprocal link exchanges is a simple yet very powerful website promotional tool.
If done correctly, increasing your linkage will:

1. Increase your traffic significantly.
2. Improve your visibility in the search engines.
3. Provide an added resource to your website.
4. Save you a lot of advertising money.
5. Save you time.

Before you start, you need to know that the largest drawback with building one's link popularity properly is TIME. It takes time to:

* Find the websites to link with
* Make the link requests
* Wait on those link requests
* Process, organize, and manage the links
* Have the search engines find or "spider" your link partners
* Check to see if your links are still on your partner's websites

Link building is difficult, frustrating and time intensive. We want to help you to save you money and time by offering our link building services






Link building
What is Link Popularity?
Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing TO your site FROM other sites on the Web.
Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines

We specialize in placing text link ads on high quality websites
Our text link ads are unique because they are a direct source of targeted traffic and can raise your natural search engine rankings.
Read more: link building services

Building links through reciprocal link exchanges is a simple yet very powerful website promotional tool.
If done correctly, increasing your linkage will:

1. Increase your traffic significantly.
2. Improve your visibility in the search engines.
3. Provide an added resource to your website.
4. Save you a lot of advertising money.
5. Save you time.

Before you start, you need to know that the largest drawback with building one's link popularity properly is TIME. It takes time to:

* Find the websites to link with
* Make the link requests
* Wait on those link requests
* Process, organize, and manage the links
* Have the search engines find or "spider" your link partners
* Check to see if your links are still on your partner's websites

Link building is difficult, frustrating and time intensive. We want to help you to save you money and time by offering our link building services

http://www.linkbuilding.org/guide/tips.asp




Link building services
Now these days, inbounds links are the one of most important factor for getting a high keyword ranking, the most search engines are ranking their search result on the link popularity from your site.

In the near future every major search engine will use link popularity, so developing and maintaining it are essential to the success of your business.

Not the quantity from the links,
but the quality of those links is important.

Facts About Link Building

* Link Quality vs Quantity:
Link quality is far more important than link quantity; however, as long as the links get indexed any link will likely help make your site seem more authoritative to search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.

* PageRank vs Anchor Text:
Anchor text is more important than PageRank.

* Reciprocal Link Requests:
Most people who request link exchanges are not worth exchanging links with.

* Link Building Timeline:
It can take many months and hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to build an effective linking campaign.

* One Way Links:
Directory links, press releases, and related website links can help you build an effective linking campaign without the worries associated with exchanging links with sketchy sites.

* Promoting Good Ideas: It is far easier to create an idea worth promoting than it is to promote an idea on worth promoting.






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Link Building benefits for your business:

* Get steady, free, targeted traffic from new and return visitors to your Web site.
* Get more customers through increased targeted traffic.
* Find out which Web sites link to your competitors and convince these sites to link to your Web site.
* Benefit from new business contacts and develop a powerful network of people that can work with you and send customers to your company.
* Increase your link popularity so that your Web site will be ranked higher on many search engines.
* Save yourself hours of manually searching the Web for suitable partner Web sites, contacting them and creating link pages. We will do this for you.
* Create complex and customized link pages that perfectly fit the layout of your Web site.
* Get more sales through increased new customers and traffic.
* Create a customizable link directory that you can offer to your visitors as valuable content.
* Statistics feature provides detailed information about your reciprocal link building campaign.
* Your links pages can be custom designed to what ever categories and sub categories you want.
* We can check outgoing links on your link directory pages.
* We can check if your partner Web sites still link to you.
* The benefits will last for years.

Link building packages
You could spend hours upon hours contacting other webmasters to exchange links.
Then, you would have to spend more time ensuring that the links that you traded are still up.
Our Link Building Experts takes care of this for you.

Our Link packages are placed in a number of different and quality websites for the months you pay for.

What is included?

* Live online reports (view example*)
View contacts we made and links we get to your site in real-time.

* Monthly updates
You can update your links or anchor-texts once a month.

* Spam free
100% according to search engine guid
Link building tips
Building Link Popularity is a great way to help your site gain competitive PageRank (PR).
Links from other sites also send direct visitors to your site.
A little care in developing links will go a long way in getting your site ranked high in Search Engines.

In this article:

* PageRank of the linking page.
* Total number of links on the linking page.
* Industry relevance.
* Page relevance.
* Anchor-Text.
* Dynamic link pages.
* JavaScript link pages.
* Redirected links.
* Framed sites.




PageRank of the linking page
PageRank of the linking page, one of the most important factors, determines how much valuable importance is passed on to your page.
The higher the PageRank of the page linking to you, the higher the value you get.

Each link to your Web site is considered a vote. If your neighbour states in public that you are very trustworthy, or that you are his best friend (Google PageRank 2), this is of course a less important vote than when the President of your country says the same (Google PageRank 9).



Number of links on the linking page
The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PageRank value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page.
Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 outgoing links is much better than getting a link from a PR4 page that has 60 outgoing links.
With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links.

It is therefore as important to evaluate the total number of outgoing links on a links page, as it is, to evaluate the PR of the linking page.
This is where many people often falter, as they usually insist on getting a link from a high PR page, but if that page has 100 outgoing links, your page would only get 1/100th of that value.



Industry relevance
Search engines give higher importance to links pointing to your site from your own industry segment as opposed to those from unrelated industries.
A link on a site about motor sports will do very little good for a restaurant site, however a link in a food services directory will likely have high relevance.

Searching industry relevance pages:
Search for similar pages once you have found a really good page.
Look for "similar pages", "related pages" or "more like this" next to entries in any search engine's results list.
Alternatively use the Page Specific Search on the Google Advanced Search screen.



Page relevance
Most sites offering links have several categories listed on their sites. Try to get a link from a category that closely matches your own industry.

For instance, if you have a site related to hotels, then, on your partner site, a tickets site for example, try to identify a resource directory pertaining to hotels, resorts, reservations, vacation packages, travel, tourism, food and beverages, etc.

An algorithm called “Applied Semantics” determines the industry relevance of a page within a site. The Applied Semantics algorithm studies various keywords on a Web page and tries to determine the industry or business segment of each page. Applied Semantics estimates the industry segments that are relevant to a particular page.



Anchor-Text
Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text on a Web page.
Since anchor text is very important, make sure that your most important keywords appear in the anchor text from the link pointing to your site.

It tells search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google.
If you use "click here" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click here". If you use "Part 2" as the anchor text, your telling the search engines the page is discussing "part 2".
You wouldn't want to rank highly for "click here" or "Part 2".

However, if your site is all about purple widgets, you don't want only "purple widgets" to be used as the phrase in every link to your site. Over-optimizing like that would create an unnatural pattern.

You can use anchor text in:

* External links – links from other sites.
* Internal links – links on your pages.
* Navigation maps.
* Links on your main page. A very important spot.

Remember that real live humans will read your links as well as search engines, so the words in your anchor text need to make sense!



Dynamic link pages
You should also watch out for any link pages that are generated dynamically.
Chances are that such pages would not get indexed soon enough, which means that a link from such a page would not benefit you.
Some dynamic link pages are intentionally generated in such a way so as to prevent them from getting indexed. Some unscrupulous webmasters do this to trick you to prevent any PageRank leaking from their site to yours.
Links from such pages therefore do not give you any benefit.

Examples of dynamic links include URLs containing symbols such as “?” or “&”.



Javascript link pages
It is also important to identify pages that are generated through Flash or a JavaScript, as Search Engines cannot read Flash pages nor can they read the links embedded within Flash.

These are some of the tricks unethical webmasters use. While such a site may claim to have placed a link to your Web page, in effect they are not giving you any benefit.



Redirected links
A link that is first redirected to another page within your partner site before pointing to your site is a redirected link.

You should watch out for such links, as search engines do not give weight to redirected links. It is very unlikely that your site would draw any benefit from a redirected link.



Framed sites
Avoid getting links from framed sites as Search Engines cannot read texts within frames.
A link placed on a framed site would not give your site any benefit, as Search Engines would not be able to recognize such a link.