Link Building Guide

Link Building is a painstaking process which is always on going. To get your website high in the rankings you will need to constantly be building backlinks with things such as link exchanges, article submissions, directory submissions, press releases and social networking.

In this guide we will give you a few tips on the best methods to start off with link building.

Link Exchanges

Link Exchanges are a great way to get back links to your site from other sites with the same topic. This means that people who are visiting will be looking for a certain type of website which your site will be so they are more than likely to use your website to it’s full potential rather than browse for a minute and move on.

You can get Link Exchanges by browsing for sites in the same genre as yours and sending emails to webmasters saying why you think it will help their site to have reciprocal links on the 2 sites and will help generate traffic.

Article Submissions

If you write quality articles then people will want to read them. If you submit these to Article Directories then people will see how good your content is, and come over to your site to have a look at your other articles.

Make sure in the articles you have a link back to your site with the link text (anchor text) the keywords related to your site.

This is now doing 2 things, it is link building and

helping with traffic back to your site when people click these links.

Directory Submissions

Submitting to web directories is a never ending task although it is probably the single most important way of link building. Make sure you start submitting your site to directories gradually rather than adding to 500 directories one day and then not bothering for a month. This is because Google and other search engines will think something fishy is going on if a site suddenly gets 500 backlinks.

The best thing to do is when you do it gradually is to add to say 100 directories to get you started and then every couple of days add to 20 more.

here are a lot of tools on the market for automatic directory submission but the best way is to add these manually because you never know what information a “bot” will use when it adds your site to all of those directories.

There are some of the best directories below with their PR (Google Page Rank) listed next to them.

http://www.dmoz.org 9
http://www.lii.org/pub/htdocs/home.htm 8
http://www.femina.com 7
http://www.gogreece.com 7
http://www.sacentral.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm 7
http://www.worldhot.com/ 7
http://www.123india.com/ 7
http://www.elib.org/ 7
http://www.ezilon.com/ 6
http://www.epooch.com/ 6
http://www.christiansunite.com/ 6
http://www.toronto1.biz/ 6
http://www.canadianeh.com 6
http://www.aardvark.co.za 6
http://www.nzs.com/ 6
http://www.aigam.com 6

Social Networking

Social Networking is a great tool for link building. If you are a user of Facebook or Myspace you will be able to build links back to your site quickly with bulletins, shared articles and other things to be able to gain lots of links and huge amounts of traffic.

If you are an advanced coder you will be able to code something like a Facebook Application which will be able to “give” the Facebook community something in return for your link being on their profile which could then be anything betweeen 1 and 1 million backlinks (Depending on how popular the application is)

Social Bookmarking

As well as Social Networking there is also Social Bookmarking (Confusing, huh?)

This is where you can share your favourite sites with friends and other internet users which can generate links and traffic.

There are many places where you can exchange social bookmarks with other people to add that extra link and when done hundreds of times again, builds backlinks.

The most popular Social Bookmarking sites are:

http://del.icio.us/ 8
http://www.digg.com/ 8
http://www.furl.net/ 8
http://www.diigo.com/ 6

Remember that Link Building is a very important process so put a couple of hours a week aside to go through and buid a few more back links or even pay somebody else to do this for you.