You already know the importance of link building: it dramatically improves your SEO and is essential for driving traffic to your web-site. Many starting businesses can struggle knowing where to start from. Here is my top 8 link building strategies every new business should do: 1. Adding blog to your url: If you do any business online or at least have a business web-site it is essential to have a blog. Add it to your url (eg.: http://www.nameofyoursite.com/blog) and create internal links to it. All the search engines loves it. Especially Google. Google loves fresh content. Adding a blog, posting to it once daily, linking to homepage or other important pages of your web-site with keyword anchor text is a great way to gain loads of internal links. Mix things up on your blog and much as possible by adding videos, pictures, polls etc. But keep it simple and easy to navigate for the user. Make your links with keyword anchor text look natural. Never forget: you have to create value not for yourself but for YOUR VISITORS. 2. Join Local Organisations: Find all most important local organisations, from which ones you can benefit any way, and join them. This might be your local Chamber of Commerce, Local Authorities, etc. It will not only get you a very good links back to your site, but also provides network opportunities with other local businesses. 3. Submit your site to Local and Industry related Business Directories: This is most common technique and if you starting SEO you will find about it almost on every blog. There are lots of companies or individuals who can do it for you for money but my advice is to do it yourself as it is important for your business to know what you doing here. Start with your Local Business Directories. Submit only to your business relevant directories and answer all questions. Don’t submit to hundreds of directories a day, try to do it in steps. Rather then using only your homepage, use different landing pages for appropriate directories. (eg, instead of using always http://www.nameofyoursite.com, differentiate between http://www.nameofyoursite.com/blog & http://www.nameofyoursite.com/something/and/so_on). 4. Comment on Local On-line News and Forums: Find the local news published online and forums, that is relevant to your business, and always comment on them. And remember: DO NOT SPAM! Just express your opinion by showing you are expert in your niche. This is something you should strive to do on daily basis. 5. Write Articles and submit to Article Directories: This is also known as article marketing and is a great way to get links back to your site. Pick up the topic of your niche, write an article about it and submit to article directories like EzineArticles, ArticleCity, ArticleBase etc. Ideally your article has to be no less then 500 words long. Again, this shows that you are expert in your niche. Use keywords throughout content at around a 2% density and no more than 5%. In the resource or bio box tell a bit about your business and yourself adding the links back to your website. 6. Write and Submit a Press Release: Writing press releases and submitting them to places like PR Web or Web Wire is a great way to generate interest and buzz about your business and also to get links back to your website. This method of link building is a little more difficult. Press releases have certain requirements that must be met, a certain format that must be followed, and in most cases, need to be super interesting. Not having any of these elements can almost guarantee that your press release will either be outright rejected or not distributed to other news related websites. On internet you can find loads of PR (Press release forms and examples). 7. Social Bookmarking Social bookmarking is a great way to build a links: The trick to social bookmarking is to not only bookmark your website, your blog posts, and other things related to your website, but bookmarking lots of different things that interest you. This will make your bookmarking profiles look much more natural to both viewers and the search engines. The best bookmarking sites to submit are Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Maxx and Propeller. 8. Create profiles on Social Networking Websites: As social Networking Websites like Facebook and Twitter have enormous volume of users it’s always good to have an account with them. Some Internet Marketers even concentrate solely on Facebook or Twitter (Facebook Marketing or Twitter Marketing). The more fans you have on your Facebook Fan Page or followers on Twitter, more value you bring to your business. But there is few thing you have to consider: your content has to be very interesting and updated regularly. If you will follow all this strategies on routinely, you will see in couple of months your page ranking boost significantly. All these online marketing techniques are mostly free and your only investment will be your time. Once again I want to remind you: create value not just for yourself but most importantly for your visitors!
