Link Building Tips For The Newbie Blogger

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-Clicks 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 overexcited. 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.

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