It’s one thing to understand why building links is important, and quite another to figure out how to do it effectively. I’ve found there are three primary ways to build links:
1. Create your own links
2. Recruit links
3. Buy links
Create your own links. Do you own any other websites other than the one you’re focusing on? There’s an easy place to start. If you don’t have any other websites, have you considered building some? I run an SEO and web design firm. Specifically to promote my site, and also for the fun of it, I admit, I have built, am building, or have taken advantage of the following websites:
Salt Lake City SEO
This website (The Organic SEO)
Don Loper – Adventures in Entrepreneurship
Web Design Blog
My Web Design Company
Bad Billboards
Salt Lake City Audi
Skateboard Blog
Advertising & Marketing Blog
The SEO Consultants
Utah Web Development Firms
Utah Internet Marketing
Utah Web Design Firms
Utah Advertising Agencies
Utah Firms
Laundromatic
There are probably a few I’m forgetting, and several others I’m working on. Of course this requires a bit of work and so I wouldn’t consider it one of the first things you should be doing, but it’s definitely an option. And there are more reasons to do this than just SEO. SEO just happens to be one of the benefits you get from it and so it can add some extra motivation.
You can also create your own links by posting on websites such as blogs and forums. It doesn’t take too much effort to create an account and start posting. Many forums require you to be registered for 7-10 days and/or require you to post at least 10 times before they will allow you to insert live links in your comments. Still, it’s a fairly easy way to go. To find good forums and blogs simply search for some of your keywords + “blog” or “forum” and see what comes up.
Creating your own links is not the easiest way to get links, nor is it the best way, but it’s something you have almost complete control over. And I’m barely scratching the surface here. There are hundreds of other ways to create your own links.
Recruit links. This is the best way to get links, but can also be the hardest, and brings us to the terms “linkbaiting” and “linkbait.” Linkbait is content that is so very, very interesting that lots of people want to see it and lots of people want to link to it. It could be textual content, but it can also be videos, artwork, resources, or what have you. It’s just anything that is super interesting and/or useful. I’d focus on the word “useful” rather than interesting. If you can create parts of your website that are truly useful, and free, then you stand a decent chance that people will start linking to it. Use websites and/or tools like Digg, Stumbleupon, and del.icio.us to create links and attract others to do so as well.
Buy links. This is the easiest way to get links, but not the best way, especially with Google encouraging people to snitch on each other about paid links. Still, it’s easy, and it works, so I say go ahead and do it. Two “link brokers” I trust are http://www.text-link-ads.com and http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/. The latter tends to be a bit more expensive, but you often get what you pay for.
You can also buy links by signing up in paid directories. Some of these directories are paid and some are free, but may require more work than the paid ones.
This should be enough to get you started building some links. If you really want to dive into it consult SEOmoz’s Professional’s Guide to Link Building.
I wanted to comment about the paid links. Its unreal — Google has a banner that tells others to report these paid links, which I learned from my website optimization consultant.
Taking that a step further, someone approached me via email [spam] about buying quality pagerank links and I responded. I purchased $600 in paid links. 1 month goes by, and Google is finding me with these links — I checked the webmaster tool.
3 months later, half of my links are removed from the sites [because it was a scam] and the other links are no longer valued by Google — the webmaster tool no longer shows any of the links.
Just my 2 cents.
Do you like SEOMoz? Is the membership worth it?
I should probably create a whole post on that. Here goes…