Link Building: The Most Difficult SEO Challenge? 4 Tips for Getting Started:

You’ve done all your business analysis, put in hours of keyword research, written website copy that a best selling author would be proud of, have ‘calls to action’ all over your web pages, have an ‘opt in’ and have optimised your website to the hilt.

That was the easy part – easy, because you had control over it.

You decided what design went on your website, you decided what keywords you wanted to target, you decided what content you wanted and you decided your goals for the website.

But, what’s the one thing that you absolutely need for a successful website and the one thing you have no control over?

What one thing do the search engines (especially Google) prize over everything else?

That’s right! Links.

Links from other websites to your website or blog.

Ideally links with your prized keywords embedded in the link.

But how to get these links and how do I know how many I have or how many I’m competing against, i.e. my competitors?

OK, lets take a look at how you get an insight into who is linking to your website.

Go to Yahoo, and type into the search box:

explore:www.yourwebsite.com -http://yourwebsite.com,

so in this case, lets say we put in:

explore:www.interleado.com -http://interleado.com, below is a snippet of what you get back.

As you can see, there are around 235 links in total.

This shows you what websites link to your website and what exact page the link is coming from.

This will enable you to find out what links you have, so how do you go about building new links to your website.

1. Write Articles:

Start to look at websites that allow you to write about your particular niche and will give you good exposure. For example, Hubpages, ezineartricles.com and articlebase.com are all great websites to start building links from. Just signing up and getting a profile will give you a link. Admittedly not one with great value, but its a start.

When you have signed up, the next thing you need to do is to write an article about your favourite topic.

When you write the article be sure to leave a link back to your website or blog. So, that’s your linking campaign started.

2. Submit to Popular Directories:

By far the two most influential directories in terms of authority back links to your website are DMOZ and Yahoo.

It can take months to get into Dmoz, and there’s debate as to the usefulness of the entry once it is there. But Google puts a lot of authority and it sometimes takes text from the directory listing and uses it in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

You can suggest your website to Dmoz here, but very careful follow the submission criteria exactly and make sure you choose the appropriate category, as this can be crucial in getting the listing. By the way, your submission is looked at by human editors, hence the length of time it takes to get in the directory.

Getting into the Yahoo directory is relatively straight forward. You suggest a website here, pay $299 to get your website reviewed and then pay a recurring fee of $299 annually to keep the listing.

Note that the first $299 will only get your website reviewed with 7 days. There is no guarantee that your website will make it into the directory.

3. Comment On Other Blogs In Your Niche

Another great way to start getting links is by reading the blogs in your niche area and starting to comment and leave links back to your website/blog. Some blogs have setup nofollow though,  which means the search engine spiders will not follow the links that are left in comments, thus you will get no ‘link love’, i.e. the search engine will not count the link.

How do you find what blogs are in your niche area? Well, what are your keywords? Search on them and see what blogs come up? Or search for your keyword and add the word blog to the search, e.g. if I put the following into a Google Search, ‘Internet Marketing + blog‘, this is what returned:

So, here you can see several blogs about Internet Marketing where you can start to read and leave comments as appropriate.

4. Build Link Bait Naturally

Link bait refers to any content placed on a web site with the purpose of attracting links to it from other web sites.

Of course another way to get links into your website/blog is for people to link to you naturally. Why would anyone link to your website? Well, maybe you have something interesting to say on your website? Some good articles/posts about your niche area. There are some great tips on writing great copy here at Copyblogger.

So, have a look at the resources listed and start to build your links. In part two we’ll move on a bit and talk about professional software packages that can help you build your inbound links.

How do you get back links to your website? Have you tried various methods but are still finding it hard to get good rankings?

In Summary:

Quality links rather than just volume should be your goal – that is the key to building ranking authority with the search engines.

Summed up this amounts to:

Link Popularity + Link Relevance + Link Trust = A Quality Back-Link

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