Link Building for Small Business Websites

My Value Added Link Building Strategy

If you want your website to rank well in the search engines, one of the vital elements of your website development strategy will be link building. The question that you have to ask yourself is “Is your website hanging out in the right crowd?” Are you getting quality links from related websites, or are you getting 300 links for $29.95. If you are using the latter strategy then the links you are getting are probably worth less than what you have actually paid for them. The search engines, especially Google, are getting very good at detecting link building schemes, and will discount the value of these links so that they are virtually worthless.

How do you find sites that are worth linking to? The main strategy that I use is to look at the sites that are currently ranking in the top 20 for the given search term that I want to rank for. I then look at the sites that are linking to them. Feel free to try and get links from the sites in the top 20, but given that these sites will be your direct competitors, and given that they already are ranking well, it is unlikely that they will consider your link request.

What is far more likely is that you will be able to link to the sites that are linking to the sites in the top 20. These are likely to be sites that are complementary to your website, and they will be far more open to your link request as you are not directly competing with them. You can also look at the keywords of these complementary sites and then do a search for forums and blogs on the web relating to these keywords. If you find the top 2 or 3 of these submitting posts to these forums and blogs can also be a good way to create links for your site. Just a word of warning that when you do this, do not just start spamming these forums and blogs with your website. Submit quality content, and solve problems for people and then link your website in your signature.

Article marketing is another great way to add value to other websites and then create a link to your own website.

When you are creating links for your website the best way to do this is to create some quality content to submit to the website owner for inclusion on their website. The content should create some benefit for visitors to their website. A useful tool that you use, or 100 to 200 words, or a list of the 10 best ways to do something are content that can be useful. You can then offer them this content to use on their site, with the only stipulation being that they give you a link to your website. Ideally you want to be able to format the link to target the keywords that you are looking to rank from. Do not get caught in the trap of creating the link from your website name.

Your links should serve two purposes. They should directly bring traffic to your website from another website. This is why you need to look at related but non competing websites. The second purpose they serve is to increase the value of your site in the eyes of the search engines. When I look at the value of a link, a link that serves both purposes is the most valuable. A link that serves the first purpose of bringing traffic can be still quite valuable depending on the volume and quality of traffic that reaches your website.

And finally, a link that serves just the purpose of trying to increase your pagerank with the search engines is practically useless. The search engines, especially Google, are so good at detecting and discounting these now that I see them as a waste of time, effort and money.

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