Link Building

Link building is the process of creating inbound links to your own website. Having a good number of quality inbound links (or backlinks) is essential to helping improve your page rank and its position in search engine results. You can build links by exchanging links with other websites, participating in Topsites lists, getting listed in online newsletters and ezines, online communities, directories, etc. Most of these forms of linkbuilding are free, although some are not. You can also pay for advertising in online marketplaces and other sites to help increase your backlinks.

The key here though is creating relevant links. And how does one do that?

First, make sure you link with other sites that are similar to your own. If you only sell quilts, and you are linking to a site that only sells bath and body products, how is that going to help you? Quilts and bath and body products have nothing in common, i.e., there is no relevance. Linking to similar sites is always the best option because it creates relevance on search engines. In order for a search engine to find your site, there must be relevance between a search term (query) and what you sell on your site. So if your banner or link is on a site that is very different from your own, no relevance is going to be found to help anyone locate your site. So be choosy about whom you link with. If your goal is get people (and search engines) to find your site, then there must be meaning and relevance between your site and whatever other site you are linking to.

Second, if you’re doing a banner exchange, make sure that the site you’re linking with also provides a text title and/or link to your site. Web spiders and bots cannot read images: they can only read text. So if you only have a banner on someone’s website, no search engine will ever find it there. If the other site lists at least your site name, then that can be read. Banners are great, and eye-catching, but only to humans. And humans have to actually look at them in order to see them–and that doesn’t always happen. Text links are always better alone, or in combination with a banner, for the spiders and bots that crawl websites for the SE’s.

So what’s a good starting point for finding other relevant sites to link to? One thing you can do is network via online communities and social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook. Check out websites of people you’d like to link to, in order to see if they get good traffic; and check out their page ranks as well. If they’re good, send them a polite email and ask if they’d like to exchange links with you. Most will usually say yes, but if they don’t, no need to fret. There are many other sites out there to which you can link.

You can also use the search engines to find places to link to. Go to Google and type in something relevant to what you sell, and see which results show up on the first page. Those stores are at the top of the search results because their links are already popular! So email some of those store’s owners and again, politely ask if they’d like to exchange links. Then try doing a search using your own keywords from your site. The results you get will be for stores using the same keywords, so you know their sites are relevant. And then when you go to those sites, check out their links to see who they’re linking to as well.

Another way to build links is to create a content rich site, including articles and even newsletters. If you have lots of quality content on your site that others find useful, they will want to link to that info, and they’ll want to share that link with others too. This can do wonders to increase your link popularity over time.

Finally, leave your link everywhere! Include it at the bottom of your emails. Include it in your signature in newsgroups, on discussion lists and in online communities. You might be pleasantly surprised where your links will turn up in search engines by doing this.

Here are some additional linkbuilding tips:

• When soliciting other biz owners for a link exchange, always have all your pertinent info included in your email–your name, your store name, your full URL, and your attached banner.

• When someone sends you their graphic URL or the graphic itself, DO NOT hotlink to their graphic. Hotlinking is when you simply link directly to their image, without uploading it to your own site’s server; it’s also called bandwidth stealing and it’s a big no-no. Always, always, (and did I say always?!) upload the graphics to your own server and link to them directly from there.

• Download the Google Toolbar. It allows you to check the page rank of other sites you might want to link to. A link of 3 or better is desirable. Keep in mind that page ranks can fluctuate.