Okay, so now you have your website set up complete with a nice quantity of pages with high quality content. Now what? It is time to start creating backlinks from websites that offer high quality content that is related to the topic of your website.
What Is Link Building Anyway?
Link building is the process of creating inbound links or backlinks as they are called, to your website for the purpose of increasing your ranking with the search engines and generating targeted organic traffic to your site.
Quantity vs. Quality
A lot of website owners tend to think that the more backlinks pointing to their site, the better. Not so. You can have a zillion links to your website that contain inferior content or worse, content that is irrelevant to yours. The search engine spider picks up on this and end result is a lower page ranking.
When it comes to creating backlinks, quantity is not as important as quality if you want to improve your ranking with the search engines.
A Few Link Building Strategies
Establish Relevant Links: Establish inbound links to your website that are relevant to your product or service. These should be links from other established websites that offer quality content and also practice ethical link building.
Anchor Text: The inbound links should be integrated with your search engine optimization strategy. By this we mean that it should correlate with your keyword research with the keywords included in the anchor text of the link. The text should also clearly identify what the visitor can expect after clicking on the link.
Squidoo Lenses: Squidoo lenses are single web pages that you can set up on the Squidoo website to highlight quality information you have to offer. It only takes a few minutes to create and you can insert anchor text links to your website.
Social Media: You can promote your website from social websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook allows you to display your website link from the profile page.
Use Signatures: Participate in forums and blogs that deal with subject matter in your area of expertise. When you sign the message, include a link to your website in your signature provided the posting rules allow. Be sure to establish a genuine relationship with other forum members or your signature link could be interpreted as spam.
Create a Blog: Create a blog related to your product or service on a different blog network such as Blogger, Xanga, or WordPress and then create links to specific pages on your website that relate to the material being discussed in the blog.
Press Releases: You can use websites such as PRWeb or PRLeap for submitting a press release about the launch of your website, or something exciting that is happening in the industry of your product or service. These PR websites also distribute information to a variety of news outlets on the Internet.
A key element to remember is for link building and backlinking to be successful, your strategy must be carefully planned and relevant to the product or service you are offering.