Link Building Tips – Our Top 10
As you read through our top 10 link building tips below, you’ll get an idea of some of the key strategies you can put in place in order to do your own link building.
- Check what sites are linking to competitors
Yahoo Site Explorer is a great tool that lets you see what sites are linking to any given website. This means you can find out the extent or lack of link building your main competitors have done, as well as finding out the specific sites that are linking to them.
- Approach site owners directly
If there’s a particular site you want a link from that’s relevant to what you do then you should contact the site owner directly to ask for a link. When you do this it’s wise to take a personal approach rather than just send out one general email to all the sites you want a link from.
- Try to get one way links
When asking for links from other sites most people take the approach of promising a reciprocal link to the person they’re contacting. The trouble with this approach is that reciprocal links can often negate each other so the link you’ve asked for doesn’t have the same impact. If you want one way incoming links then try to offer something other than a reciprocal link to entice the website owner to link to your site.
- Don’t just link to your homepage
While your homepage is the most important on your site, it’s a good idea to focus on other pages too when getting incoming links; these are known as deep links. For example, if you’re a central heating company and have a page about boilers on your website, you can target relevant sites to link specifically to that page rather than your homepage which mentions all your services.
- Outgoing links matter too
If you read about link building online you’ll find that most of the advice is tailored to building incoming links and outgoing links are often ignored. By linking out from your site to relevant and trusted websites you can improve your search engine rankings. Be careful not to go overboard and link to too many sites though, as you don’t want to provide too many opportunities for people to leave your site and visit another. One or two relevant outgoing links is usually enough to make a difference.
- Make a note of every site you contact
Link building should be an ongoing process and as such it’s a good idea to keep a spreadsheet of all the sites you’ve contacted to ask for a link in order to avoid asking them more than once and appearing unprofessional.
- Use article marketing
Article marketing sites such as ezinearticles.com allow you to raise awareness of your business, drive traffic and create incoming links to your site. If you’re using more than one article marketing site then make sure you change the title of your article and some of the main text so that it’s not exactly the same on each site you submit to.
- Write a press release
An online press release can be a fantastic and cost effective way to not only get your business noticed but generate lots of links to your site. So if you have something interesting or newsworthy to say, you should do it through an online press release which can then be picked up by many different websites with each of them supplying a link back to yours. There are many online press release websites including prweb.com
- Write content worth linking to
If you write good content on your business blog and make sure it’s optimised then people may start linking to it from their sites. For example if there’s a big news story that’s affected your industry, you could generate some incoming links by writing about it from a slightly different angle than everyone else.
- Tell people your preferred anchor text
It’s all well and good getting lots of links coming into your site but in order to maximise the benefit you need to tell people what anchor text you’d like them to use. Anchor text is the word or phrase that people will click on to come to your site from someone else’s.
For example, if you’re a London plumber and want to be ranked highly for “plumbers in London” then you should ask people to use that as your anchor text rather than just using your website address.
If you liked this article you may also want to read a beginner’s guide to link building
Nice post about link building , i totally agree with you but i rather using social bookmarking and article submit to get backlinks to my blog
how much backlinks should i build in a day to get PR 3 in 3 months?
Thanks for your comment. In answer to your question it’s a question of quality rather than quantity when it comes to backlinks. The relevance and reputation of the sites that link to yours has more value than simply a high quantity of links from sites with poor relevance and PR.