A Guide To Link Building

Link building can be the most time-consuming part of your SEO day. Especially if your budget is nothing, or next-to-nothing. The lower your budget, the more you should try to get people to link to you through great content and linkbait. If you have experts and creative people in-house, those strategies can work wonders.

Your efforts into link building need to focus on 3 main things, 1) make link acquisition appear like natural growth; 2) make the links as relevant as possible without over-targeting keyphrases in your anchor text; 3) acquire a mixture of links through blogs, directories, social bookmarks, content sites, etc.

A good place to start with link building is actually performing a search for the keyphrases you want to rank for. Getting links from the sites that appear highly ranked for these phrases, logic suggests, will help you rank for those same phrases. Collect a list of sites that rank for all your targeted phrases, along with variations. You can send polite, unique (no mass-mailings), emails to the webmasters asking if there's potential for a link to your site. Be sincere. If you have the time, give the webmaster a call. The personal touch can go a long way. Make sure, though, that your site has something to offer the visitors of the page you want a link from. It's a hard sell to ask someone for a link that doesn't provide some good information or insight. Your website should be complete and strong (no "under construction" pages) before you start building links.

Purchasing links is an option. While all of the major search engines, not just Google (they're just the loudest), speak out against buying and selling links, the truth is that when done right, it helps. When buying links many times people become swayed by PageRank. Don't fall into that trap. A highly-relevant PR4 link will likely help your site more than an off-topic PR5 link. Do your homework and follow the steps in the grey box below to determine if a certain link should be purchased. Always stay away from sites that blatently advertise links for sale, Google may have removed their ability to pass "link juice" on to other sites.

Directory links have taken a hit in popularity recently, but I don't feel the value is completely gone. You just need to spend more time looking for the good ones. If you're looking to get some directory links, first begin by searching for industry specific directories. If you sell widgets, search for "widget directory". From there, look for more respected general directories that have categories for your product or service. Before purchasing a link in a directory make sure the page your link would appear on is indexed in the search engines. Also check existing links in the directory for "nofollow" tags, and do a query in Yahoo to see if their backlink is registering.

Social bookmarking is another avenue for both links and traffic. While del.icio.us won't pass link juice it is a popular destination and may get you traffic. Other bookmarking service, of which there are many (a list to come), do pass link benefits on. Don't overwhelm your site with social links, remember to be balanced.