The Magic of Link Building

Backlinks are links that are directed to your website from other people's websites and blogs. Link building is vital to any website because it shows the search engines that your site is important and a good enough resource that other web masters are willing to link to it and direct their traffic to your site.

Backlinks are great because they generate traffic to your site by giving visitors to the outside site an active link to click through to your site. But that is not all. Possibly the most important reason for link building is because it also increases your PageRank. PageRank is Google's way of measuring the importance and relevancy of a website.

The more inbound links pointing to your site, the higher your PageRank will be. The higher your PageRank, the more willing other websites will be to link to you. As you can see, this snowball effect feeds itself. Once you have your first few links, link building becomes easier. The more links you have, the more visitors you get and the more important your site appears to the search engines.

Link Building for Fun and Profit

1. Many of your visitors will have websites and blogs of their own. Ask them to link to you. You'd be surprised how well this works if you offer content that is really useful and informative.

2. Make it easy for others to link to your web site by creating a "Link to Us" page and give them the html code so all they have to do is cut and paste it onto their web pages. The easier you make it for them the more likely they'll be to link to you.

3. Submit some articles to article directories and include a link back to your site. Article marketing can really be an effective way to generate links and traffic back to your site. Some marketers have developed whole campaigns around submitting articles to article sites.

4. Submit your url to various directories. Back in the early days of the internet, there were no search engines like Google or Yahoo. People found what they needed by searching a directory that was broken into categories.

Today, most people prefer to use the search engines to find what they need. But the directories are still around. Some people still use them and the links still count for PageRank.

For a comprehensive list of directories you can submit your website to, check out StrongestLinks.com.

5. When you link to a website in exchange for that website linking back to you, it's called a reciprocal link.

Similar to directories, many website owners have devalued reciprocal linking. They argue that the search engines don't use reciprocal links to calculate page rank any more. Many say that reciprocal links aren't not worth the time it takes to obtain them.

But there are others who still have great success using reciprocal links. The key is to not just link to anyone just to have a link. Link to sites that are truly useful and relevant to your visitors and those should count.

When done right, reciprocal linking will work and both websites should receive a boost in traffic.

All links are not created equal

As we have mentioned, the quality of the link is very important. If you are getting a lot of links from sites that are in no way related to the content of your site, they aren't worth very much. However, a few really good links from well trafficed and respected web sites will generate a higher page rank for you.

Links from sites with .gov or .edu domains are like gold. If you know anyone researching at a university what your site is about, politely ask them link to your site. If your site offers good information they can send their visitors to you just might get a link. If you have friends in government jobs and your site has great information they would want to share, you just might get a link there. All you have to do is ask and all they can say is yes or no. Not a big deal.

To have many incoming links is good but to have a few great links is awesome. By focusing on quality over quantity, your results will be better and Google and the other search engines will respect your site if you have respected sites (sites with high page rank or the right domains) pointing to yours.

Happy linking!

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