Search Engine Optimization News, Website Promotion Tips

Posted By jucick on February 28, 2009

Obtaining one-way quality links is often cited as the “Holy Grail” of online success. Especially if you take the SEO route for getting high rankings for all your profitable keywords in the search engines. It’s no wonder then, achieving top spots for valuable and popular keywords should be the ultimate goal of any webmaster or online marketer.

How well you do in this “link quest” will largely determine the success or failure of your site or online business. Assuming of course, you’re going after free organic traffic from the search engines and not using Pay Per Click or other means of succeeding online.

Link building and achieving top placements in the search engines (especially Google) has been my main objective for over ten years of online marketing. Over the years, I have tried hundreds, if not thousands of link building methods in order to get those links. I would like to discuss briefly some of those methods and then explain in full detail my four favorite and most effective proven ways to get quality one-way links.

First, some general tips on how you should approach your link building from the get-go. You must realize the web is based on content; web surfers/users are looking for quality content. If you can supply valuable content that the surfers want, you will build your links naturally. People will see your content and want to link to it. This process is often referred to as link baiting – you make your content/offer so irresistible, they will not only want it but they will go out of their way to tell others about your fantastic content.

Be careful not to link to “spammy” link farms and it’s probably a good idea to always check the Gooogle PageRank PR of any site or page you link to on the web. Many cautious webmasters/marketers won’t link to anything less than a PR3 page but use your own judgment here.

There are numerous ways of getting quality links:

. place your links in directories – free and paid

. join online forums and place your links

. do recommendations and testimonials

. viral videos with your embedded links

. join social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc.

. use hub traffic sites like Squidoo and Hubpages

. use Google sites like Google News, Google Docs, Google Knol

. use Wikipedia to build links

. use Yahoo Answers and those types of sites

. use eBay and sites like Craigslist

. use viral ebooks and software programs

Next we’re going to explain most effective link building techniques – these are the proven methods that have worked for many webmasters. No doubt you may have heard of many of these link building methods before… but here goes:

Article Marketing

This is still one of the most effective ways to build good one-way links to your site. Yes,  this is “old school” but it still works. At least for now, there are rumors Google is cracking down on article links but for now links in your article resource boxes are still very effective.

From experience, article marketing is one of the most effective technique at building links.

The Top 5 I Use Are: Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Isnare, Ideamarketers, and Buzzle.

Whether you’re just a webmaster or into online marketing you must realize all this stuff is a “numbers” game. The more content you have out there, the more links you have on the web – the more traffic and visitors you get coming to your site. It’s not rocket science, it’s simple math. The more links you have, the higher probability someone will click them and come to your site.

The same goes for high rankings in the search engines, the more good quality links you have, the higher your rankings. Article marketing will give you highly targeted keyword links to your web pages. Also you can use SubmitYourArticle which will automatically submit your articles to many different article directories.

One last point about article marketing - you’re not just using articles to build links, you’re also using articles to “pre-sell” yourself, your site and/or your product. It’s a very effective way of funneling interested visitors/buyers to your site.

AddThis Bookmark

Yep, it’s “social media” sites you’d probably use to your advantage. And it would be a BIG mistake not to use these social media sites for your own link building.

Sites like MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Linkedin… and thousands of others are very important for link building. They are becoming even more important as Google moves away from articles and focuses on the “real interactions” taking place on these sites.

You may want to use the Addthis.com bookmark to your site or pages so that your visitors could build your links for you. This really works, so if you want this simple way of building links just use the Addthis.com bookmark to your site or pages.

Google Alerts Link Building

This method of building good quality one-way links does take a little more work but it is extremely effective, especially for getting high rankings in Google.

Here’s how it works:

You sign-up for Google Alerts for your major keywords that you’re promoting. Google will send you email alerts whenever a new page/site/link is created containing your keywords. You then go to those newly created pages to make a comment and add your link.

Many of these new pages will be on blogs so you can easily add your comment and link. The trick is to add valuable comments/content which the site moderator will approve because it adds to his/her site’s value. Many will also approve your link because your link is related to their site and this is just good SEO practice.

The key here is to put yourself and your site in the whole discussion of related blogs, sites and forums relevant to your content. You want your site in the whole mix of things so that relevant links will flow naturally from the discussion. Now all your links won’t be accepted but you can easily add 2 or 3 links each day with very little time spent on this. Great way to build links, hope you can give it a try.

Press Releases

This method of link building is a very effective but It’s not cheap.

Press releases are very effective because you can embed your links with your “anchor text” into the body of your press release. Other sites pick up your release and place it on their site with your keywords/links embedded. This seems more like natural link-building which the search engines loves, especially Google.

Source: Site-Reference

Category: Link Building, SEO Tips
Tags: LINK BUILDING, RANKINGS, TIPS