You’re probably aware that link building is one of the things that you can’t bypass if you want to be successful in the Internet and make money online. It is often difficult to understand where you can start.
The main thing you need to understand that links itself don’t serve just for bringing direct traffic, they are also the means through which search engines judge you and establish the value of your content. The more websites send links to you it means that other people appreciate what you offer to the community. So until the syntactic algorithm will hit the market search engines need to base their results on links – that is back links.
So link building is so important because you want to rank on the top page of Google’s results for the key phrases which are relevant to you, to your products, to your services, to your website, to the content you offer to the visitors.
The point where you should start your link building process is making sure that your website can take all the traffic. You need to optimize the content and make sure that the server can take it. Optimization simply requires you to fill your website with keywords and have the right tags set up. The server simply needs to be fast enough and have a large enough bandwidth.
Once you are sure that everything is up and working on your part you will need to get the actual links. Here are some of the methods often used by the SEO community (this not a full list!! – Many others will comein the future).
First and most simple method is to comment on blogs. Just find the blogs which suit your content and which are part of the same niche as you are. Read the posts and comment on the topic (you must bring value to the discussion). Somewhere in the topic make sure you include your link. One thing to be aware of, is that 99% of links from comments are “nofollow”, meaning that they have a very small value (if any) in the Google algorithm, but the value is important for the traffic you get from it.
Social bookmarking is an interesting piece as well. People like to bookmark the content they like on the web. They don’t save the entire website, just a specific page, and attach a description to it so people know what it’s about. Digg.com for example is a bookmarking site, and if enough people liked you link (dugg it), it will be promoted to the front page….where it will get 10,000 visits in 2 hours! In those 10,000 people, many of them will talk about your article in their blog, and then link back to your site. This technique is called Link Baiting, and relies entirely on the quality of your content.
Link building is sometimes considered as a hard thing to do. The reality is that you always have to create quality content, however this will not be enough, you must find a way to promote that content, and social bookmarking is a good start.