Linking Building - How to Gain Links
One of the most important things you can do for a website is to gain links. Let's face it, you need links to get anywhere in any search engine. Even if you did submit and the search engines indexed your site, it would not stay without links, or would be lost in the oblivion of the search engine's index. Links give your site trust and popularity.
Did you know that you don't even need to submit your website to search engines? That is correct all you really need is a nice link from another indexed page and once it gets crawled it will pick up your site. Still even one link isn't going to do it. You need to gain more.
Now that you can see that gaining links is important, you may be thinking how you can gain links.
Different Ways in Obtaining Links
There are a few different ways that are suitable in gaining links. One thing to keep in mind though is to not be very hurried in gaining them, or the amount you gain in a certain amount of time is a great amount. This can stall your website into a penalty stage or it could if left give you more than a penalty.
One way to gain links is to get them reciprocally. If you have some friends online exchange links with them. That would be a good start. Next do some searches and find sites the same as yours or closely related and ask for an exchange. Don't go for the big guys as most of them don't exchange anyway, try small websites like yours and you will get more that way. Remember gaining links with close related web sites to what your site is about is best, but if someone you know pops you a link on their non related site don't worry about it.
The next way to gain some links is to join a group or forum that allows signatures. Participate as much as possible and viola, you have made some traffic by those links on your postings. Plus, it would be targeted traffic if those groups are related to your website.
Of course there are paid directories and such to gain some links. This can be very helpful if you don't have time to add links reciprocally. Just keep in mind to gain your links for targeted traffic and just don't worry about Google PageRank™. After a while your web site will improve over time naturally.
Last but not least is that if your site provides decent content about something some people will just naturally link to your website because they think it is good information to share. Writing articles for your web site can help, as articles provide good information for people to link to. Then again, they have to find you website first. So you need to find some links or a way to get your website seen.
One Way Linking Best ?- Not Really
You may have heard that you should only get one way linking as it is better. Well this is not necessarily correct. Links that are related to you and the link text is on your pages will actually help you for relevance. So it is good to link out whether you have a link back to you or not. Just link to places that you think will help your site and your visitors at the same time.
Maybe there is a competitor that sells widgets, but only blue ones. You sell both red and blue but are out of the blue ones. Or maybe the other site had different widgets than you. It is only natural to try and provide a service to your visitors to go to the other competitor's site.
Link Build Naturally
So, you want a big boost on your website that you just got up. You go to everyplace you can find to add something to your website. Blogs, Squidoos, MySpace, Amazon, BizRate and anything like this. You do a whole bunch at a time. Creating blogs just to make a link, same with MySpace and Squidoos, just enough info to make it and add a small paragraph once a week or so for a little while but not much. This is not the natural course to linking. Do they bring traffic? Yes, they can but may not, and building more than one or two can be considered spamming. So bringing in traffic from them shouldn't be considered the best thing when you are looking for a long term stable site.
Google™ (we mention Google a lot as it is the only search engine we like to be concerned about) is really cutting down on links that do not look natural. Trust us gaining 5 quality links from sites is much better than 100 links from blogs that are just created for the purpose of links, there are however good decent blogs out there that are ok. Just don't go creating them for links as a search engine algorithm can easily be configured to filter out sites that use these techniques.
Linking Long Term Goals for A Stable Website
Your goals for your website should be reaching for a stable ranking and stay there, fluxuating up or down 1 to 2 places. To do this you need to stick to a link building regimen, slowly gaining your links without anything major happening. Getting over 100 links at one time sounds good, but may not be good in the long run. It doesn't look natural, and if it doesn't look natural your website will be filtered to not show up in even the top 100 ranking results in a search engine.
In conclusion your link building is the most important step you will be making on the success of your website. Do it wisely, safely, not worrying about PR (Google PageRank™), leaking PR, to many links going out, quantity and not quality, etc., and your site will remain successful!
©Stacey Pettibone 2007