Everyone knows that the more links you have pointing to your website, the higher up in the search engines you will climb. For experienced search marketers, finding links is not a problem; they have developed relationships and exchanged links before, so they know exactly what to do, but for the new marketer, building links may be a bit of a challenge, but it doesn’t have if you go back to the basics of link building.

How Link Building Works

Basically, you find websites that are ranked high in the search engines. These can be popular websites or websites that have been around for awhile. These are typically sites that the search engines have crawled many times over. You simply contact the webmaster and ask them to link to your website. It sounds easy enough, but there’s a little more to it than that. If you are new to search engine marketing, you might not be able to sell them on your website stats or substantial earnings from promoting products, but you can show them a well put together website that has the potential to make money. Even if you don’t have much traffic at the moment, linking to more popular websites can get your site crawled quick as the search engines frequent these sites more often.

Finding Websites to Link With

A quick and easy way to find websites to exchange links with is by doing a simple Google search using your specific keywords. Look at the pages that appear at the top of the results. Check out websites that are in your niche, but not direct competitors.

For instance, if you are selling reconditioned auto parts, you may want to link with a site that is advertising tires, or rims.

Check your competitor’s link popularity to see who is linking to them. You can also contact the sites that are linked to them for potential link building opportunities.

Many will say no, but don’t be discouraged. If you take a look at how many websites are in your niche, you will see that a few closed doors won’t end your efforts at building links.

There are a few tips that make them think twice before they turn you down:

  • Personalize your email and include contact information.
  • You might want to try calling or sending them a fax in place of an email.
  • Add their link to your website before you approach them. In your email, include the URL for the location of their link.
  • Be sure to identify yourself and your intentions immediately so your email does not end up in the Spam folder.
  • Include the HTML or your link to make it easier for them to cut and paste it.
  • Double check to see if they have a links page.

There are tools and various grey/black hat marketing methods to get links, including paying for them. If you want to get true quality links, do it the old fashioned way.

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About

Brad has over 20 years of experience in customer service, sales, marketing, product development and business process improvement having working for market leaders in a variety of industries before starting his own business in 2006.

Sunshine Coast SEO provides variety of online search marketing services including SEO, PPC, Conversion Optimisation and Direct Response Marketing.

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Filed under: Linkbuilding

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