Building Links To Your Website
You may have heard that search engines like to see links and lots of them to a website, it helps search engines to decide which sites they should list, because a link to a site is a bit like a vote for a site. That’s a valid point as, spammers networks aside, websites do have a tendency to link most to other sites that have something of interest to the first sites readers.
If you are a small business owner with a website how do you go about building links to your website? There are many ways to get links but first it is important to understand that not all links are the same, some are much more powerful than others. A small few links from good authoritative site can be worth as dozens of links from other.
The best links to get are links that are composed of your target keywords as the anchor text (the clickable words on the other site) and they come from relevant sites in your industry or sites that are otherwise influential. (A link from Harvard University to your book-keeping website would be choice even if it is not related to your business!)
Some practical ways to get links to your website:
Firstly, have good content, whether this be in a blog or traditional style website, give potential link sources something good to link to then promote it:
- Give it a mention in your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc accounts.
- Mention it in relevant forums and blogs that allow comments and links to articles.
- Try bookmarking your piece at social bookmark sites like Digg or Stumbleupon.
- Submit a shorter version to Ezinearticles or GoArticles with a link to the main article on your site of course.
- Blog it anywhere you got a blog.
See if your suppliers will link to you and try getting links from appropriate associations of professionals.
See if you ca do a deal with a similar service in another city, a mention with a link to them from a blog article of yours in return for a similar mention from them of your website.
See who is linking to your competitors and see if you can get links from them too. You can check your competitor links by typing the following string into your browser location bar:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:somedomain.com%20-site:somedomain.com
Remember to replace the two ‘somedomain.com’ bits in there with the domain you are checking.
Are there specialist directories in your industry? Prominent bloggers? – Try to get links from them or a product review (with a link to your site obviously).
See if you can guest post in those industry blogs with a link or two to your site of course.
Even unrelated sites can have their uses, local directories help to get your name out there have a little link juice and they are good citation references if you are hoping to get a Google Local Business listing (more about that another time…).
If you can write an article on your industry you could also try publishing it on article directories or on social media websites like Hubpages.com. Remember to include a link back to your site of course! Even better write a few articles and submit them to a spread of article directories like GoArticles.com and Ezinearticles.com and some social sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. Interlink them a little and have links from all or most to your main site.
Got a blog section with an RSS feed on your site? Add the RSS feed to the various RSS distribution services such as feedagg and feedage.
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Tags: backlinks, building links, link building, seo links
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