Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about building relevance and trust for your website. Between the two, a higher weightage is naturally given to the latter because it is obviously much easier to manipulate one's own website to improve relevance.
So, how do you build trust for your website? You build trust by creating backlinks from external sites - every backlink is considered a vote of trust towards your website. Alas, this is a simplified explanation because the search engines actually consider many other factors such as the trust of the linking site, the number of external links on the page, the placement of the link, text surrounding the link, theme of the website, anchor text used, whether a nofollow attribute is applied, etc.
Unless you have a relatively big company that is able to generate media attention, chances are you are going to have to actively go out and build your own backlinks. The trick is to build backlinks from different types of websites so that you have a mixed backlink profile. You should also spread the link-building work over an extended period to make the growth look natural, in order not to raise a red flag with the search engines.
One of the most popular places to obtain backlinks are from web directories. However, the search engines have caught up with the trend, and Google for example, started penalizing web directories in their search index and lowered the value of directory backlinks. However, there are still a handful of directories that are still worth considering like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, and Botw, although they are quite expensive - an annual listing in one of these directories alone can run you up to $299/year.
Another major source of backlinks are content sites like Squidoo and Hubpages. You have the freedom to submit articles of any topic and add your backlinks in the content. Because these types of sites receive millions of visitors every month, you not only gain the benefit of a backlink from a high trust website, but also potential customers who visit your website from the links in the article.
It is worth noting however, that sites like Hubpages have very strict editorial policies, such as the published articles should be original and not published elsewhere before. Authors are also scored based on the quality of their articles and their participation in the community. The author score is very important because a nofollow attribute will be applied to the articles if the score falls below 75, rendering the backlinks in the articles useless.
Online press release sites like PRweb and Singapore365.com are also worth exploring. Due to the nature of these types of websites, companies are given more leeway in promoting their products and services in the content - in fact, it is expected! And because most of these press release sites only accept paid submissions, you can expect your press release to almost always get approved, no matter how commercial they may sound. Most of the press releases submitted to bigger sites like PRweb also gets syndicated on Google News and Yahoo! News, giving your press release added exposure.
Larry Lim is an SEO specialist, having consulted for multi-nationals like SPH, Edelman, TM, Popular, Knight Frank and iProperty, since 2005. Visit SEO Company to learn more about his Search Engine Optimization services.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Larry_Lim_T_Y
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