Link Building Strategies

Link Building Strategies
by Justin Maas

Link building is a search engine optimization technique that looks to increase your website's prominence in search engines. By having a large amount of links that go back to your website search engines will place you higher and higher in the results for keywords relevant to your website. There are tons of different methods for link building, some legitimate and some illegitimate, and I will outline a few of them here.

The first method and probably easiest to do is reciprocal link building. Find a website that goes along with or seems complementary to your website and contact the webmaster of the site. Ask him/her to place a link to your website on theirs and explain why you think it would be beneficial for both of you. Before you contact the webmaster be sure that you already have a link to their page on your website as this will show them you are serious about creating a mutual partnership. It is also a good idea to send them a link to your website in the email that they can copy and paste to make sure they don't accidentally build a non-working link on their website.

Another way to build links to your website is to give people a reason to link to you website. Provide content that people will want to read or see and make them link to your website because they want to. If you can get you website to be seen as a thought leader you will see links to your website increase. This method is time consuming and not easy as it takes time and effort to generate content that is worthwhile. This can be done through article marketing which involves writing articles that are useful that have a link to your website at the bottom.

One link building strategy that is a bit time consuming is becoming active on message boards. Find a message board that is based around a topic related to your business or industry and become and active member. Post and reply as much as possible and become a very visible member of the message board. Include a link to your website in your signature and your website should see and increase in traffic and prominence in search engines as there will be many links going back to your website.

Link building is time consuming, but very much an important part of creating a successful website. If you aren't on the first page of the search results you probably aren't going to be seen. Take the time to build a network of links that will give your site credibility and allow it to continue to grow.