When trying to rank your website or blog in the various search engines a fair bit of your efforts will go toward building links to your site using the various keywords and anchor text you happen to be trying to rank for. There are three primary you can do this.
Passive Link Building
I better throw this one into the mix as well, despite it being a less active technique. You can choose to let your content speak for itself and hope that generous webmasters will come across your work and then choose to link to it all by themselves. While you will get a few links this way it shouldn’t be relied on to move your rankings upward, because unless sites like Mashable, Techcrunch, or the Huffington Post choose to give you some link love you probably won’t notice much of a difference.
This method should probably be seen as a bonus system of links. The best way to entice other bloggers or webmasters to link to you is to write truly “pillar” content that simply isn’t available anywhere else. When you consider that an authority site could easily charge (and get) several hundred dollars a month for a relevant link you soon see the merit in taking the time to do the job properly, and write some amazing content.
Automated Link Building
There are of tools, programs, or services available to you that can quickly generate a massive amount of links to your website, but unless you use them sparingly and appropriately they can end up doing you more harm than good. It’s relatively easy for someone like Google to spot the patterns that are inherent with these systems and apply a penalty to your site which will effectively “null and void” most of the link building work you’ve done.
In severe instances Google can even choose to de-index your site from their results all together leaving you in the unenviable position of trying to replace any and all traffic they would have been sending you.
Manual Link Building
Manual link building is by far the most time consuming method, but it’s also the method that gives you the most control over where and how your links are placed. There truly is an art to link building, and it’s a skill that’s important to have if you’re planning on being online for some time.
The important thing to remember is that the links you build today will continue to pay off for years to come. A link on a brand new site today could turn into a PR 5 link if the webmaster of that site puts enough work into it over the coming years. When you consider that the same is true of all the hundreds or thousands of links you build you truly get a sense of that value of manually building these links.
A truly ambition blogger will even take it to the next level by building links to that other persons website in order to improve the rankings of the page his or her link is on. Guest posting is one of the most effective ways of getting a link from a website you admire and you should always make a point of not only responding to any and all comments the article generates, or sharing the content within your social network, but also building backlinks to the article itself so that the link coming from it becomes ten times more valuable to your site.
Whichever method you adopt as your favorite you shouldn’t discount any other out of hand. It’s always a good idea to incorporate a mixture of diverse links into your link building campaigns.
Another important aspect of link building should be recording, by recording the date, location, contact information, anchor text, and link authority (PageRank) you can quickly check on your links to see how they are doing, and whether or not they are still in place.
Link building is an ongoing process that should be continued for the life of your website. Over time as your own authority and PageRank improve the value of your site will also continue to increase, and the potential earnings will improve. A 125×125 banner ad on a PR2 website might bring in $20, or $30 dollars monthly, but the same 125×125 banner on a PR7 site will fetch closer to ten times that amount.




























Tracking Your Link Building Efforts
Google is by and large the best source of free traffic available on the web today, and in order to take full advantage of that traffic we have to pay attention to certain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aspects which include link building. Generally speaking, the more links, and the more powerful they are, the better the rankings you can expect in the search engines.
Building links usually gets outsourced to SEO “experts” because website and blog owners think there is some secret aspect to the whole process, but truth be told there are plenty of high ranking sites out there that are being run by people just like you. They say “practice makes perfect” and with the repetitive nature of link building you’ll soon be an “expert” yourself.
When building links to your site it’s important to remember that your site is made up of inner pages as well as a homepage. Link generously to all your pages and then interlink within your site to take full advantage of the SEO benefits that come with those links.
Link diversity is something that pertains to building an assortment of links rather than focusing the majority of your time on one you might find “easy” or “comfortable”. Many people get in the habit of only using commenting as a means of getting links and totally miss out on the numerous other methods out there.
Here are a few of the links you can look at using in your own link building campaigns:
Now there are many more links a person can get such as software download sites (create, or have a piece of handy software designed and then upload it to the hundreds of high ranking software sites that are online. Images, Video’s, eBooks and more can all be used to generate links to your website. The only limits are your imagination and creativity.
All this link building effort should be tracked so that you can see at a glance where and how your links are being placed as well as the effect they are having on your site’s rankings. A few things you might want to keep track of are:
There might be other aspects you’d like to track and there are no hard and fast rules, but the simple act of tracking your links serves to act as a performance document and tracking sheet. It also tends to lend itself toward motivation, because most of us like to see measurable results increasing over time as a direct result of our efforts. And last it also serves to legitimize your blog, or business. Inventory lists, operations manuals, sales tracking sheets, etc. all show that an individual is taking his or her blog seriously.
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