Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Search Engine Optimization - A Practical Guide to Link Building

Search engine optimization is critically important for any company, big or small. The most common method of finding websites is done via the major search engines and the higher your site shows up, the more visitors you will get. A key factor in determining how high your site will rank is link popularity, primarily determined by the number of sites that link to you. The process of increasing this number, link building, is arguably one of the most difficult SEO tasks. Nonetheless, an extensive set of back links is essential to outranking your competitors.

While the process of building links may seem daunting, especially at first glance, it can be surprisingly exciting. Much like the field of SEO in general, there has yet to be a proven best strategy on how to build links. The art of link building is constantly evolving and everyone approaches the job a little differently. Below are in-depth looks at three link building techniques that every company should be pursuing.

1. Learn From Your Competitors

One of the best ways to begin or refocus your link building campaign is to analyze what your competitors are doing. The objective is to find, analyze, and reach out to the sites that are linking to your biggest competitors. There are tons of ways to go about this, the cheapest being free online resources. There are many back link providers online that supply the URL and anchor text of hundreds of back links from any competitor. On any such provider it may take a while to weed through the list and find the quality sites, but going through it will give you a general sense of the sites linking to your competitors. The trick is to reach out to said sites and convince them that your own site is worth linking to as well. And the games begin...

Some more great tools to track your competitors can be found at SEOmoz.org, the leader in SEO resources. A useful free tool from SEOmoz, Open Site Explorer, allows you to explore and compare competitors' back links using metrics to judge for quality. You can find some other powerful link building tools on SEOmoz that require a pro membership (check out their free blog to learn more about SEO resources and strategies). Learning from your competitors is an excellent way to build up back links, but in order to pass your competitors you have to pursue other methods as well.

2. Utilize Directories

Directories provide a relatively quick way of obtaining back links and can generate rapid results in search engines. Submitting websites to directories has always been a bit of a controversial issue in the world of SEO as it has been shows that misuse of search directories can result in penalization from search engines. Nonetheless, an educated method of utilizing directories for link building can produce valuable SEO results. In many cases, all you have to do is enter some general company information and you will get rewarded with an instantaneous link.

There are countless lists online of high volume free directories to submit to and many include page ranks and other helpful attributes. To avoid penalization, is imperative to only submit to directories that have categories relevant to your site. Once you locate the best category, be sure to check the guidelines to see if you can link to deep pages within your site. The deeper the links you submit to the directories the more pages of your site the search engines will crawl, enhancing the effect of each back link. While the high success rate of getting listed in directories (especially compared to that of emailing sites that link to your competitors) can be captivating, don't forget the importance of implementing multiple strategies.

3. Write Articles

Article and blog posts are the best way to get the exact back links you want with the most optimized anchor text. However, great links come at a great cost. And naturally this type of link building strategy takes a lot of time and effort. The primary goal is to write articles with applicable information that include links back to your site. You can then publish the articles on either relevant sites or in article directories. Not unlike search directories, article directories can be a relatively efficient strategy to get back links. Once again, you can do a quick search on Google to find a list of high trust article directories to submit to.

Many article directories have various posting rules (no links in the first paragraph, no more than three links, etc.) but in every case you should be able to find at least one way to get links pointing back to you. This may come in the author's bio section or in a profile page but the opportunity will be there. Another location to post articles is on blogs or relevant websites. Try doing some research of suitable blogs or sites and reach out to them with your article. Many webmasters will jump at the opportunity to include your article as a guest post especially if you are providing rich content.

Conclusion

All of the aforementioned strategies offer great opportunities to significantly boost your company's online presence, but an essential component to any successful link building campaign is variety. Try to create a balance of your different link building efforts. Email some websites that link to your competitors, submit your site to a couple of directories, and publish a couple articles that link back to your site. Definitely make sure to document your efforts and keep track of your link building results.

While these link building strategies only scratch the surface of SEO tactics, they are a great place to focus your efforts. Welcome to the game that is Search Engine Optimization.

I am a search engine optimization specialist at SeniorHomes.com, a free resource for people looking for senior housing or senior care for a loved one or themselves. Check out our Seattle Assisted Living page for an example. Or just Google it.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alex_Glass



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

informative!!! seo is the best way to get traffic to a website. i got seo services for my site from XnYnZ.com