Link Building Online

By Pat Smith

Link building online is one of the most powerful, yet simple, ways to improve search engine rankings and drive targeted traffic to your website or blog. It's important to develop a link building strategy instead of randomly choosing websites to link to or receive links from, as well as formulate strategies for including internal links.

Many options exist for link building online. One of the most common is to submit websites to search directories such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Another is to build links through article marketing and targeting specific keywords that link back to internal pages within a website or blog.

Social media marketing can be a great way to develop multiple inbound links. Several options exist for building online presence through social media. Business owners can create a Facebook Fan page to publish inbound links to a specific page. Twitter is another good venue for creating buzz about a topic or to solicit product sales. Other popular social media venues include Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Wikipedia.

Another popular link building strategy is leaving comments on popular websites or blogs. It's important to determine the quality of the website before embarking on link building campaigns. Having inbound links directed to a website from a site that is considered spammy can drag your website down.

Using the Google toolbar which reflects page rank can help determine if you should connect a website to your own site. It's best to develop inbound links from sites with a page rank of 3 or higher. The primary goal is to obtain quality links from reputable sites.

In order to get the most out of link building through comments, it's important to leave quality comments. Writing "great post" or "thanks for the information" is not quality. Instead, incorporate specific keywords that relate to your website content.

For example, if your website is about solar panels and you're visiting a blog related to green energy, your comment should include 'solar panels' and 'green energy'. Do NOT try to sell your products through comments. Instead, let your comment pique viewers' interest so they want to click your link to learn more about what you offer.

Link exchanges are a popular online marketing strategy, but this tactic should be used sparingly. Many Internet business owners embark on link exchange campaigns in attempt to develop hundreds of inbound links. This strategy can backfire if you aren't careful who you exchange links with. Again, quality is better than quantity. Stay away from link farms, link exchange services, or linking to irrelevant sites.

Internal link building is just as important as external link building. Internal links must be optimized with proper keywords and linked to appropriate pages. Otherwise, this link building strategy will fail. How many times have you seen the words "click here" posted on websites? Those words are irrelevant to the topic of any website and are a wasteful link. Instead, create anchor text links for the primary keywords on the page and link to another page within your website that is about the topic at hand.

Once you master link building strategies, you can further expand online presence through video marketing and podcast marketing. When developing online videos or audio podcasts it's important to focus on the primary keyword that you want to obtain search engine ranking for.

If you've never embarked on link building strategies, do yourself a favor and engage in a marketing training course or consult with an online marketing company. Going about link building the way wrong can cause serious harm to your Internet business.

At Online Marketing DNA we have developed link building solutions that provide positive results. Our proven system feeds the search engines with the food they want and can provide you with streams of quality traffic that fuels profit margins.

If your online marketing efforts aren't providing the results you desire and you're ready to learn how to harness the power of link building online, contact us today.