In a previous post about Search Engine optimization (SEO) I mentioned that link building (getting links from other sites to your website) is the biggest factor that affects your Search Engine rankings. So that leads you to the question:
How Do I get Links To My Website?
Well, the good news is that there are many ways to get links to your site, the bad news is that there are many ways to get links to your site. There are so many ways to get links to your site that a person can seriously get overwhelmed. A few years ago I wrote a post called “101 FREE Ways To Increase Your Blog Traffic” most of those methods involved getting links to your website. The truth of the matter is that there are more than 101 ways to build links to your site! So where do you start?
Well, first of all I recommend that people find 2-3 methods of building links to their site and focus on those. It’s easy to get caught up in always trying out the latest and greatest methods of link building, BUT then you never get really good at any of the methods. So, here is a list of some of the methods we use in our business to get links to websites. They work and they are fairly easy to implement. Unless you are in an unbelievably competitive market using just 2-3 of these methods will really help increase your traffic and your website’s search engine rankings.
1. Directory Submissions
There are many people in the SEO/Internet marketing world who for the last 7 years have been claiming that directory submissions don’t help you get traffic and don’t help your rankings. However, for that entire time I have been using directory submissions to get websites ranked and it’s still working for me. Directory submissions are an easy way to get related links to your website that will help your site rank higher in the Search Engines.
2. Article Marketing
Article marketing is my personal favorite way of getting links to a website. Article marketing is essentially the process of writing articles related to your website and allowing other people to reprint them on their website provided that your by-line remains intact and that they link to your website from the article.
The by-line of your article should have the name of the article, your name, a short description of the article, reprint information, and a link to your website. After you write the article you submit it to what are known as article directories. These article directories will display your article and allow other people to reprint them on their websites. This can lead to a lot of links to your website.
3. Video Marketing
With video marketing you come up with a video message or slideshow, then create the video and then post it to video sharing sites like Youtube, Metacafe, Google Videos, etc. It’s a pretty simple process and can result in a lot of traffic and links to your site. Not to mention Google tends to rank videos high in the Search engine rankings for some terms, so not only can you get links but your videos may rank for some of the search terms you want people to use to find your site.
4. Social Bookmarking
One way your company can get more links is through social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites are sites where people post articles that are voted on by other users of the site. Two of the most well known players in the social bookmarking arena are Digg.com and Delicious.com. The social bookmarking site that brings the most traffic to my sites is Stumbleupon. Stumbleupon is easy to use and once you start getting stumbleupon friends to vote for your articles you will start seeing a steady stream of new traffic from the site, not mention links.
5. Link Exchanges
Much like directories some people claim that link exchanges don’t help you get higher Search Engine rankings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Link exchanges with other websites still works to increase a website’s rankings. In fact, if you have a blog and you can find 10 other quality blogs in a related industry to trade blog roll (links on every page of the blog) with you, in most cases you will be on the road to top 10 rankings in no time. Now on the downside you have to spend a lot of time keeping track of whether or not people still link to your site and managing the requests you will get from people wanting to trade links with you. So it is time consuming on an ongoing basis, BUT it does work.
The bottom line
There are many ways to build links to a website. Become a master of a few of those methods and you will be on your way to dominating the Search Engines. If you need help then contact us at (832) 497-1610 or by email at info @ mantywebdeisgns.com and we can help you create a marketing plan, teach you how to do it yourself or we can do it for you.
