Growth and Marketing

Getting traffic to your new web site can be done in many different ways. You can buy traffic, you can place ads on Google and elsewhere, you can create a press release, and you can create (or buy) links to your stuff. Link building is definitely something that can be done on the cheap, or even free, you just need to put in your itme and effeort. One of the nice things about creating good links is that not only do you get the search engine “respect,”  but you also get people clicking through the link. A nice “two-fer.”

Link Building 101,
by Susanne Meyers

After you’ve worked on your first website for a while and realized that visitors don’t magically arrive at your virtual doorstep, you start to learn a little about traffic generation. One of the first things you’ll likely come across is building links. Let’s take a look at what link building is and how it can help you in your online business.

What Is A Link?

A link is a connector between two web pages. It can connect an article on your website to a category or home page, or even another article on the same site. Those are considered internal links since they connect one part of your website to another.

Then there are external links that connect a page of one website to that of another. For example, when I write an article and post it in an article directory, I connect my article page on the directory to a page on my own website via the link.

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the process of going out there and actively building more links – creating more connections – that lead back to pages on your own website. This can be accomplished by writing and submitting articles like the one you are reading right now. Another good link building example is writing guest blog posts that include one or two links back to the writer’s website.

Other forms of link building include directory submissions, blog commenting, forum participation, setting up various profile pages, social bookmarking, press release submissions and the likes. Entire courses are being taught and books have been written about the art of building links.

Why Is Link Building Important For SEO?

Why is link building so important and has so many of us devoting hours and hours out of our week on this task? For one, because it creates those connections or highways between pages and sites which of course sends some visitors our way.

By far the most compelling reason to build links though is to rank well in the search engines and thus get tons of free traffic to our sites. Here’s why link building is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

The anchor text of a link (that’s the words you are using to underline in blue and make a clickable link) is the second most important factor when it comes to ranking a page in the search engines. The first is the title tag. Combined, the title tag and backlinks make up at least 80% of ranking factors. By simply making sure you use the right title and then working on building backlinks with keyword rich anchor text you can get on page one of Google for just about any term. It may take quite a few backlinks if you are targeting a competitive keyword, but you can do will by just doing those two things.

Give it a try. Find a long tail keyword and write a short blog post or article about it. Make sure you include your keyword in the title tag (as early as possible in the tag) and then build a few links to that page with your keyword in the anchor text. For most long tail keywords 2 or 3 good links is all you need to get it to rank on the first page of the search engines.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Susanne_Myers

G&M note: to qutoe from the article, “Entire courses are being taught and books have been written about the art of building links.” You can see Susanne’s link building course, here: Easy Link Love – 13 Week Link Building Class

As Susanne says this subject can get really deep and involved, but the main points are those:

1. Links to your site with an appropriate keyword in the clickable part (anchor text) or the link. If your link says “click here” then you’re not really doing your self any favors.
2. The <title> tag on your page, which should agree with the page title and page content, of course.
3. An additional point is the the quality of the page (quality as measured by the search engine) that contains your link. For example, a link from a page on a major news site (Fox, CNN, etc.) counts for a lot more than a reciprocal link buried in the back reaches of someone’s link directory. In addition, getting links on quality pages will result in far more click-through traffic than that reciprocal link.

Whatever is one the page of your site only counts for maybe 20-30% of  the business of getting that page ranked in the search engines. More SEO tips are here: How to Earn Better Search Engine Page Ranking, and you should also remember to Link to Your Own Articles.