Effective Link Building

Building inbound links

An important element of search marketing involves building as many relevant inbound links to your pages as possible.  What does this mean?  Having a keyphrase page, for example "search engine optimization tips," that is correctly structured and coded and has plenty of relevant content, is by itself not enough to break into the top search engine rankings unless the phrase has virtually no competition.  For example, if you optimize on "purple banana eating bee stingers," - you'll probably get the top spot for that phrase, since at the time of this writing you had zero competition . 

Obtaining links from other sites to yours

One of they keys to increasing your page's ranking is to have relevant inbound links from related, important pages.  When a search engine sees that other prominent sites on your topic like your page, it figures that page must be somewhat important as well.  But you don't want just any sites linking to your page - for effective link building, they should be from important, well-established websites and they should be linked to from pages that contain similar content.  In other words, it won't do you much good to have a page discussing the merits of Fuji apples over Braeburn apples linking to your "seo tips" page, since they're completely unrelated.  On the other hand, if a prominent search engine blog discusses a list of important seo tips and they reference you and provide a link to your "seo tips" page, it will give your page a boost in the rankings.

How do I obtain links to my pages?

So, how do you go about effectively building links to your pages?  There are a variety of sources and ways via which to obtain quality links.  And remember, you want the anchor, or link text, of the link to your page to reflect your page's keyphrase.  

Directories

One of the first places you want to obtain links from are website directories.  Begin with the largest directory on the Internet - dmoz.org.  Dmoz links are sourced directly by Google, so if you have a link to your site in Dmoz Google will take notice.  Search for a category that fits your site and then click on the "suggest url" link and fill out the form to have a link to your site added to dmoz.  There are tons of other useful, industry-based directories out there - to find them, simply google for a directory in your industry. 

Partners, clients, and your own websites

The second place to promote effective link building is amongst your partners and clients - many of them will have websites, and many of them will be happy to link to your site and refer their clients; often in return for a link from you.  A note about link swapping - search engines place more weight on one-way links.  That is, if a page links to you and you link right back to that page, you don't get nearly the ranking benefit that you would if that page were simply linking to you.  If you must use circular links (two-way), make sure that the content on both pages is relevant and related.  Read our article on Building One Way Links for more information on the merits of one way (vs. circular) links.

Online social networks

Online social networks can be a huge source for not only inbound links to your pages, but for viral, word of mouth marketing that practically markets itself (which I guess is the whole idea, isn't it? 

Blogs - it's a good idea to research and get involved in blogs in your industry.  Most offer free accounts where you can sign up and contribute.  Or, you can post anonymously and link to your site.  Be careful, however - not all blogs accept link posting, some will consider it to be spam.  If you're going to post a link back to your site make sure it's appropriate and relevant to the topic.

Social bookmarks - At the bottom of each one of our pages you'll notice links to social bookmark sites.  There are hundreds of them out there.  Their objective is to allow the user to store links, or bookmarks, to her or his favorite pages on the web.  They can then easily track them, organize them, tag them with keywords, and share them with friends and fellow enthusiasts.  The benefit to you is that if many people bookmark your site you'll effectively have inbound links from the social bookmarking sites to yours. 

You'll notice that on occasion these bookmarks will change or be updated to reflect new and more popular servcies.  Facebook, for example, has been making waves recently, so we've added them.

RSS feeds and content syndication

Another great way to promote your website content is via RSS feeds.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – an XML-based format for sharing and distributing Web content.  In the upper right corner of this page you'll see our RSS icon:  We've linked it to our front page feed, so by clicking on it you can subscribe to the feed with your web browser.  What does this mean?  It means you'll be notified, via a drop-down or bookmark in your web browser, when new content is posted on Guru of Search.  If you prefer, you can enter your email address and subscribe to receive these updates via email instead.

RSS Feeds - Keep Your Visitors Coming Back

RSS feeds can be used to turn a visitor into a repeat visitor.  Once you have a visitor subscribed, she or he will be notified when there's new content that might interest them.  Once your site is well established and you have lots of content, you can offer multiple feeds based on categories.  That way, your visitors can pick and choose which type of content updates they'd like to subscribe to.

Next UP: Google Analytics

Now that you've got a firm grasp on how to optimize your website code, structure, and content; research keywords and build inbound links to your pages by marketing your content, it's time to take a look at how effective all your optimizations are.  Enter Google Analytics.  The free successor to their popular commercial offering Urchin, Google Analytics provides you with enough visitor data to make your head spin.  Read our article on Advantages of Google Analytics to get started.