Getting Started With Link Building
Introduction
This article is about link building. There are two main ways to build links. One is passive link building and the other one is active link building. In active link building you are active in building links. You contact other webmasters, submit your site to directories etc. Passive link building is a way where you do not ask or do anything to get links. Both of these ways are needed and next I will tell you why.
Passive link building
Content Writing
Writing content and namely quality content is the most important way to get traffic. When you write usable posts to your site, people will link to your posts and give others the opportunity to find you. When you start writing content decide to be the best. Offer value for your readers and try to approach issues from different angles to provide insight.
If your blog does not have good content people will have no reason to link to your posts. Write good content to provide reasons for linking your site. Do not rely solely on the good content of your site because in the beginning you need to get your site know in some way. This involves active link building that is talked about below.
Active Link Building (My Top 4)
Social Bookmarking Sites
Add your sites and posts to Digg, Reddit and Delicious to help people to find your site. Not all of the links from social bookmarking sites are counted as real backlinks, because they use the nofollow tag in links. If you do not now what are nofollow links and their effect, then look at my article on the difference with dofollow and nofollow links.
By adding your pages to these services you will get some backlinks to improve your search result ranking. You may also get some traffic from direct visitors by the nofollow links.
Directory Submissions
Directory submissions are a great way to get backlinks to your pages. You can write the anchor texts for some of these services, so think carefully what will you use. Pay attention to the description what you write because it will either get you visitors or push them away. Here is my list of the most important free blog directories:
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges can get you more visitors. It works so that you contact other webmasters to make the link exchanges. You can either contact them directly(email, messenger etc) or you can use message boards and forums to ask for the link trades. I have used digitalpoint forums myself to contact people and do link trades. It is probably the most popular forum used with small to medium site webmasters.
There are some note worthy things about link exchanges.
- Check that the link you get is a dofollow link
- Trade only links with sites that have similar content with your site
- Do not trade links with sites that do not have much content
Blog Commenting
Often you can add a link back to your site in blog comments. You can get started by finding blogs that have similar content to your site and visiting them often to add comments. Do not spam in comments or your comments will be deleted. Write comments that have actual content and a point to have a good possibility in getting your link visible.
Some of the blogs have dofollow links in their comments. Dofollow links are links that will help you get better ranking in search engines. Check out Mathew Simiana’s great dofollow blog list
Conclusion
In link building you need active and passive link building.In the beginning you need to emphasise active link building to get the first readers for your blog. As your site gets more know you can stop the active link building, because other people will post links to your site on these services and you will get links automatically.