Let me ask you a question …
In terms of your online marketing
efforts, what
have you done to make sure that the search engines recognize
you and your target market can find you?
If you have no idea what I'm talking
about or, if the answer is "nothing" then sadly, that's
exactly what you will be receiving when it comes to free web
site traffic.
People who do business on the web are
realizing that despite the fact that you can purchase traffic
though Pay-Per-Click
advertising, there is a great deal of benefit to
attracting the attention of the search
engines, from whom you can gain good quality, free,
targeted traffic.
If you want targeted traffic from the
search engines however, you have to harness the power of
link building.
In fact, I'm going to tell you a
little story …
Back in November 2007, the PageRank on
my blog increased from 5 to 6 and naturally, I was over
excited. A few weeks later though, my blog was back down to a
PageRank 5 again.
Now, I know there are all sorts of
reasons for the PageRank increasing and then suddenly changing
again in a short period of time but I was convinced that there
had to have been something I did to lose my PR 6.
Well, after about 4 weeks, I
found the problem …
I am registered with Jonathan Leger's
3
Way Links program and since I was one of the early
adopters, I had 250 links pointing to my site just from sites
with the 3WayLinks.net
system alone and what happened was that I moved my blog and
forgot to set up the resources page which displays all of the
links and my account was suspended …
250 backlinks wiped in a
day!
It's no wonder my PageRank went down.
Google must have thought I was up to no good. I then discovered
weeks after this that at the same time, my BlogRush account was
suspended because again, I'd forgotten to set up the widget on
my blog.
And yes, I expect to receive some
comments telling me that losing the incoming links to my blog
had nothing to do with anything, but I have tracked the time
period and I'm confidently sure that losing 250 back links to
my blog wouldn't go unnoticed by Google for long.
So why are backlinks or
incoming links important to your blog or website
anyway?
When determining the ranking of your
site, the search engines are really only interested in how
popular your site is. This popularity is determined by how many
sites are linking to you without you linking back to
them.
So, by working on good link building
you'll be able to get to the top of the search engine's list
because of the "assumed" popularity of your site.
It also means that you can
rank highly for a keyword term that doesn't even appear
anywhere on your blog or web site.
If you don't believe me, go to Google
and type in the term "click here." You'll notice that Adobe.com
is ranked #1 on Google for this search term and yet the term
"click here" doesn't appear anywhere on that page.
Why is this?
Everyone and anyone has a link from
their website to the Adobe website explaining that the document
the reader or purchaser is about to download is in PDF format
and to be able to read the document, they will be required to
"click here" and go to Adobe.com to download
the free version of their Adobe Reader.
Because of the huge number of links
going to Adobe.com, the search engines consider it to be a
popular website and has given it more weighting or higher
ranking than any other site trying to rank for the term "click
here."
In truth, who would want to rank for
the search term "click here" but I use this example to get my
point across. 
How to you get your links on
other people's websites?
In my view, if you're a blogger, the
first thing you want to do is provide top quality content on
your own site and then provide top quality blog comments on
other people's blogs. You can make the task of finding and
commenting on other peoplel's blogs much easier these days by
using Comment
Kahuna.
You then need to consider
submitting good quality articles to articles
directories.
You've seen sites like
Ezinearticles.com and
associatedcontent.com and you will notice that
on many of the articles, there is a cleverly placed URL at the
bottom.
Every article that you post to these
article directories is one more link leading back to your site,
and what's more, other people can post the
articles they find at the article directories on their blogs
or, publish them to their ezine … including yours.
A word of caution when it comes to
link building though … avoid using services that
promise to broker link exchanges between you and other
webmasters.
Too often, this can lead to the search
engines deciding that you are link spamming and it will
penalize you by dropping your ranking which could be more
damaging than if you'd done no link building at all.
This is not to say, however, that
search engine optimization services are a bad
idea. In fact, for many people who do not have the time or the
energy to put into link building, outsourcing to an SEO company
can be well worth the fees that they will charge in terms of
the Return on Investment.
If you do intend outsourcing your
search engine marketing though, look for a company that has a
good reputation and that come highly recommended. Ask for
references, and if necessary, ask to speak to a few of their
previous clients. If they're good, they will be excited to put
you in touch with those they've achieved good results for … in
other words, don't shy away from being bold and asking. You
want to ensure your money is going to be well spent.
Article marketing isn't the only way
to build links back to your website but it's a great place to
start if you have done little or no link building before.
Other options include videos, podcasts
and, blogging and if you have the inclination to do it, you can
approach other webmasters direct and ask them to link back to
your site.
However, more often than not, they
will not do so unless you reciprocate by linking back to them
in return which isn't as effective nowadays.
For more information on reciprocal
linking, see my blog post entitled "
Is Reciprocal Linking A Thing of The Past?"
One thing is for certain, link
building as a means to getting higher search engine rankings
isn't going to go away any time soon so if you want to get
found online, it's time to start building.
|