Image via Wikipediaby Peter Slevin
Having links from other sites pointing to your site is the holy grail of search engine optimisation. It is crucial for any successful website, and is the single most important part of your website marketing efforts in order to increase overall reach, link popularity and website traffic. Having quality inbound links will improve your search engine results, which will in the end bring you more visitors. Acquiring new links from other websites, using your keywords as anchor text, will help you improve search engine rankings.
Search engines have also begun to rank the importance of the sites that link to you. In other words if a highly ranked website links to you, it is considered more important than if an unranked site links to you. Therefore, it is important that you try and achieve inbound links from sites that are trusted by search engines. The best way to do this is to use Google’s page rank facility to determine how Google views the site. It is important to remember that 85% of internet visitors use the search engines on a regular basis. Search engines beat all other media in driving visitors to websites. Moreover, the majority of users believe companies found in top search results are major brands which equals brand equity for you.
While the process of procuring ‘inbound links can be a lengthy process, it is a worthwhile pursuit. It is something that you can do yourself, but employing an internet marketing company to do it for you can save you months and months of research and work.
The first place to get good links are from human edited directories such as DMOX and the Google directory. Being listed in these places will do your website lots of good.
Submit your site to high quality internet directories using your keywords as anchor text. Make sure, however, that you submit your site to right category.
Ask your suppliers and business contacts to provide a link from their site to yours. Because you are already doing business with them, this should be an easy task to accomplish.
PR and article submission is an effective means of acquiring links. Press releases and articles with your URL embedded in the resource box will help you secure links in news articles about your company. It will also help with creating awareness which may lead to unsolicited links from interested parties.
Content is king. We recommend that you constantly update your site’s content, and add new pages. Any search engines’ main goal is to provide surfers with fresh and relevant content. Updating your site on a regular basis will result in search engines rewarding you with higher placement within their results pages.
Employing a consultant to do your SEO and link building for you will take the pain out of the process, and produce quicker results. Which ever way you decide to go about, link building is an essential part of developing your online presence.
The author of this article owns and operates an Irish Gift Store and his Memorial Trees project.
