Develop a Powerful Link Building Strategy

Developing a link building strategy is one of the most important parts of successfully doing SEO.

The more successful you become in your link building efforts, the more likely it is that you will be able to achieve the kind of success you want to achieve with your website. Developing a link building strategy that’s going to work for you takes time and effort, but apply some of the following tips and you will be well on your way to success:

Understanding Backlinks is important since Link building is all about acquiring backlinks. A “backlink” is a link on another website that links back to your site. Generally, the more backlinks you have, the better.

Not all Backlinks are Created Equal

It’s a myth that all backlinks are interchangeable. Backlinks from pages with a high Google PageRank are much more valuable than backlinks from pages with a low Google PageRank. In fact, backlinks from pages with extremely low Google PageRank scores can harm your SEO efforts more than they help them.

Getting a Handle on Google PageRank

Google has a rating system for webpages. Every webpage analyzed by Google receives a PageRank score. The higher the score the better, but it is generally understood that a PageRank of 5 or 6 is a good score. Anything above 5 or 6 is great.  The more backlinks you get from high PageRank webpages, the better. But there is a problem. It is often a lot more difficult to get backlinks from high PageRank webpages than it is from low PageRank webpages.

Using Web Directories to Get High-Quality Backlinks

A great way to get high-quality backlinks from high PageRank webpages is to get backlinks from web directories. Web directories are online directories of webpages. They almost always have a high PageRank. To get your site listed on them (and links to your site included in some of their webpages), you often need to submit your site to them. If you have a high-quality site, there shouldn’t be any problems most of the time. If, on the other hand, you have a low-quality site with poor and/or derivative content, you will have more problems getting your website listed on web directories.

Don’t Forget About Your Website’s Quality

Too many would-be SEO masters focus so much on playing the SEO game well that they neglect the importance of making their websites as good as they can possibly be. This doesn’t mean that you have to make your website so good it’s capable of winning awards or anything, but it does mean you should take the time to make your website look reasonably good. More importantly, you should take the time to add good content to your website. The better original content you have on your website, the easier it will be for you to acquire good backlinks, and the better your site will naturally rank with Google.

Publishing Articles to Get Backlinks

A good way to get decent backlinks is to publish unique articles to article directories. Article directories are directories that contain scores of different articles. Most article directories are happy to take new submissions. Often, the only criterion for acceptance is that the articles must contain 100% original content. Most article directories allow you to attach links to your articles. You can write the articles yourself if you have lots of time and little money, or you can pay someone else to write them for you if you have less time and more money.

Try Link Exchanges

Once you have gotten your website a little more established, trying a link exchange or two can help you out quite a bit. A link exchange is where you exchange links with someone that usually has a website similar to yours. Link exchanges can help you to network with other people, and also to attract new visitors to your site. (They should help you to boost your site’s position on the search engine results pages as well.) One downside of link exchanges is that they are only really a viable option for people who already have websites with a decent PageRank. If your site doesn’t have a decent PageRank yet, wait until you’ve tried other link building strategies before pursuing link exchanges. There are tons of different link building strategies, and you should do plenty of research before you decide which ones you want to implement. No link building strategy is a magic bullet, but with time and effort, using a lot of strategies should help you to improve on how well your site ranks on all the major search engines.

Have a great day…

Audrey Ferrante
Ferrante & Associates, Inc.