Link Building Strategies

Building links, both internally and externally, to your web site is one of the most important methods for getting your site to rank well in the search engines.

Part of a search engines algorithm is to rate your site based on how well your site is linked internally as well as determining the number of quality external links that point to your site.  

High quality backlinks to your site should come from sites that rank well in the search engines and have high quality links pointing to them as well.  High quality sites would include websites such as directories, encyclopedias, forums, information portals and online publications.

Link building strategies for getting high quality links to your website?

Internal Link Building Strategy

Internal web site linking is the linking you do from page to page of your site. Each time you put a link on a page linking to another page, that is a vote for that page. This is why a consistent navigation bar should be displayed on each page of your site.

Make good use of text links that used a text description that uses the main keywords of the page it is referring to . Here is an example of a text link for a natural dog food page:

http://www.sitename.com/natural-dog-food.html"> natural dog food

Submit to free and paid directories

Start by submitting your site to web directories! This is the easiest and fastest way to get your site listed. The major free directories to begin submitting to are:

Google  

Directory Storm Directory - Human Edited Directory of General Interest Sites.

DMOZ - Open Directory Project.  A comprehensive human-reviewed directory of the web.
Illumirate   - International internet directory staffed by volunteer editors from around the world

Librarians Internet Index - Searchable and annotated subject directory of Internet resources  

Each directory requires a description of your site, so make sure you use your TOP keywords carefully placed throughout your description. For each directory, use a slightly different description, this makes these links look more authentic to Google.

Most paid directories cost anywhere from about $30-$40 while Yahoo! Costing the most at $299. While it's not necessary to submit to all paid directories, submitting to 1 of 2 will help.

External link building Strategy

Developing external links or high value backlinks to your website is one of the most important things you can do for gaining page rank. To do this correctly you must find high ranking pages or websites that you can get to link to your web site or web pages.

In the old days people use to simple ask for them, this was referred to as reciprocal linking. With the start of web 2.0 there are much easier and effective ways to get links.

Start with making a list of the pages of your website that you most wish to rank well in the search engines. One of these will of course be your home page. Pick a few others and we'll focus on just those to start. The task of building links may take several weeks so selecting too many pages may become overwhelming.

Make a list of the pages and next to each page write that pages' s main keyword phrase.

Next, find blogs, forums and other websites that relate your site's topic and that also rank well in the search engines.

Make comments on those blogs using your main keyword phrase in the 'name' section of the comment. Note that not all blogs will allow you to put a keyword phrase in the 'name', if they won't simply use your own name. For forums that allow you to use a signature, use your main keyword phrase as your home page link.

Note: Never spam blogs and forums with useless unrelated commenting. Your comment will be deleted in most cases. Be genuine, join in conversations with real useful information. Comments that don't make sense or are obviously for obtaining links will be deleted by webmasters in most cases.