Now, supposing you have a website which is geared toward promoting your business, but you don’t know how to do this. Don’t panic—you can build links in these various ways to grow your internet power exponentially:

· Approach niche directories: Find out niche directories on the Net that welcome interlinking between their site and yours. Add your site to their list and use a little text (anchor text) to describe your site in a few words, with relevant code.

· Article marketing: If you write or outsource well-written articles and upload them on to your site relevant to your business or service or product, you will attract niche readers and traffic. If your content is good and updated frequently, you will soon be seen as a resource for information in your field. Later, you could sell specific information in your field.

· Social networking profiles: If you join a social media site by putting down your name and company name, your company gets recognition on the Net using some text. This anchor text will be noticed by search engines like Google and Yahoo and be ranked for recognition.

· Be keyword specific: Use specific keywords that identify with your product or service. This will identify your business on the Internet, without using advertising jargon. Short keyword phrases identified with long tails will reap rich rewards in terms of traffic to your site.

· General article directories: Let general article directories and search engines see your website so that you link up for links and marketing techniques. Besides article marketing, these are very powerful in giving you more and more business links and send your ranking much higher than you imagined possible.

· Write blogs on your site: Write blogs that invite responses from your readers. This is one form of link building. Whether you’re posting articles on your site or are replying to others’ blogs, your links that tie up with your site generate a page rank. When you leave a comment, always remember to leave your link and address of your site or blog. Always leave a link, along with your relevant and related comments to your blog or website.

· Link baiting: If you have appropriate content on your site, other sites will want to link up with you so that they seem unique to the reader. Users finding your site useful and unique will post your site’s address wherever they visit—on blogs, discussion forums, tweets… you name it.

· Exchange mutual links: This is a very mutually beneficial method of link building, though it might be just a little difficult to find sites in the same niche and with identical interests. You do this successfully with a reciprocal-link program. This makes a big difference to traffic to your site—in fact, experienced SEO writers and marketers say that you need to exchange a minimum of 30 relevant links to be successful.

Image by malias.

- InternetMarketingInc.com

I agree - especially in these difficult times for most of us, watching over SEO budget while seeking a more cost-effective, even free, approaches to SEO can only do good to your websites.

Especially if you are (trying) to make money through your websites, you have probably found the fact that your websites are under-monetized. Understanding the basics of SEO can help you make more money through limited site traffic.

How come? Better SEO = better search engine result page (SERP) position and more traffic.

However, things don’t just stop there. SEO also helps you convert those incoming traffic, as plenty of traffic without high conversion means nothing to your bottom line.

During SEO process you will optimize your website with on page optimization and off page optimization. Off page optimization is much precious than on page optimization.

Assemble your web pages along with your primary keywords. You also should links to the right page with the right keywords, as doing this correctly will affect your overall SEO campaign greatly, in a positive way.

Whenever you place a link to your websites or web pages in your off site optimization, i.e. directory submission, you should anchor text your link differently. This is not due to duplicate content that, in my opinion, too much hyped on the Net. This is due to the need to give multiple keywords linking to your websites or web pages, thus adding weight to your back link.

Understanding the practices of SEO can help you decide what’s effective and efficient to do, as well as reducing resources needed to achieve your SEO campaign’s goals. For instance, understanding SEO the right way would make you avoid any SEO companies’ offers that “guarantee” your website to rank #1 on SERPs for a given set of keywords – NO ONE can guarantee you this! In any given seconds, your #1 can be #3. Do common-sense SEO to achieve common-sense results that will last for quite a period of time.

Do avoid black hat methods of SEO. Although they can bring you good results, all of them are temporary solution, and often, illegal. The search engine bots will soon learn what you are doing illegally, and will penalize your site heavily, if not strip your website from their listing.

All in all, sound and legal site optimization can result in exponential growth of your site’s traffic and conversion. Never aim for good result in a flash, as it is often the most unreliable one.

Image by svilen001.

The Internet also revolutionizes how people do business – how people buy and/or sell products and services.
If you wish to buy a product, you can look for the best deal from online marketplace just from one click of your mouse.

Online marketplace is lucrative, indeed. Big guys, such as eBay, are raking in millions of dollar in revenue. Competing with them is impossible. The best way is to ‘join’ them, utilizing their infrastructure for you to use to capitalize your piece of the online business pie.

Unfortunately, small online marketplaces are competing with each other. One thing for sure: If you rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) than your competitors, you win. One of the surest ways to achieve this is link building.

Here are some link building strategies for you to consider:

1. Understand your marketplace

Online marketplaces are evolving fast, and to understand how fast they are evolving, you must understand the niche your online marketplace is within.

You must know what keywords to target, and analyze the keywords – How harsh is the competition? How is the growth potential?

2. Develop good content

No matter what “revolutionary” SEO experts said, the mainstream consensus has always proven effective and efficient: There is no substitute for a good content.

Customers mostly look for the good and valuable content related to their interests and that’s why you should work toward developing good contents. Every piece of information on your website should be there for a purpose; it should support your sales pitch and should direct customers into the sales cycle.

Another benefit, search engines also love good content. Optimal keywords use, useful information inside and writing style will definitely help the content to be listed higher in SERPs.

You can outsource content writing for better quality and time management, allowing you to focus on your main job: growing the business. You can always find good quality freelance writers at www.Guru.com and other freelance marketplace websites.

3. Look at social media sites

With the stellar growth of Twitter and FaceBook, individuals and businesses alike are rushing to use the social media to connect and network with others.

The exponential growth of members means one thing – bigger and bigger market to sell your products and/or services.

Combine this with your excellent content, you will receive the benefit of going viral – People recommending your site, article and eventually your business to their friends, family and colleagues, and so on. This will bring in organic traffic to your marketplace from the growing number of back links.

4. Other, mainstream, link building strategies

Link building is not about how many number of links you could get but what kind of quality inbound links you are receiving and what is the quality of incoming traffic.

Make sure you cater your target audience interests and understand what they are looking for first, then you employ the right link building strategies. One of the strategies is Directory submission - No matter what people say, it is still useful to link building purposes.

5. Monitor your progress

Just like in conventional businesses, online marketplaces have to monitor their progress. You must tailor your marketplace link building strategy according to your traffic information – Your audiences’ origin, what links bring in more traffic, what search engine terms do visitors use to visit your marketplace, etc.

You should monitor your marketplace as a business – how much your conversion rate, how much your sales increasing due to the employed link building strategies, etc.

Good luck on your link building endeavor!

Image by Dru Bloomfield - At Home in Scottsdale.

- Trish MacQueen, BloggingTips.com

Well, people running websites should know about this for long, but just like what Trish said, we are lulled into believing that. However, I do think that putting keywords inside the meta tags still have their own use…

One of link building methods are reciprocal linking. In essence, reciprocal linking is when 2 website owners agreeing on placing each other website URL into their websites. In casual conversation, reciprocal can be explained as simple as “I link to you and you link to me.”

Once link building is done then the amount of websites that link to a particular website is recognized as back links that improves the link popularity of a website, hence improving search engine result pages (SERPs) position.

Various benefits of Link Building are as follow:

• Link building drives targeted traffic from appropriate sites which can increase conversion and eventually sales - So it’s important to gain back links from related websites.
• It helps websites rank well on search engine result pages.
• Link building helps you in generating exposure and strength of your site.
• Receiving back links from important and strong websites will have your website perceived as an important website as well.

Remember, good things done excessively will back fires. Good link building practices can damage your website’s reputation and popularity if used irresponsibly.

Many thought that having 100,000 links pointing to your website is a great thing. This is not always the case. Although quantity determines your site popularity, quality plays a more important role in your link building campaign.

For instance, links from .edu (educational sites, i.e. colleges, schools and universities) and .gov (government sites, i.e. city councils and local chapters) are considered highly important in determining your site’s link popularity. On a lesser scale, having a similar topic .com site linking to your site helps your link building campaign enormously, compared to 1000 low-quality and/or unrelated sites linking to your site.

Link building is a very important activity if you want your website to gain more traffic. However, focusing too much on link building, no matter how beneficial it is for your website, will not help you much in growing your website’s traffic and exposure. Balance is the key in link building success.

Image by lusi.

Link building is often requested by clients, as it is very important in having clients’ websites exposed better to audiences and search engines. The techniques themselves are not obscure and difficult to do. However, to achieve best result, link building needs patience in order to see results.

Here are some of the reasons why link building is challenging:

Position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)

Having a company website to rank high in search engine result pages is a daunting task – You are not alone; There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO Companies and Web Marketers trying to get their clients’ website to rank high on the first page.

Consider this – You website could rank #1 on the SERPs today, but nobody can guarantee you this tomorrow, as many SEO Companies are just trying to do the same as you do.

Backlinks acquisition

Acquiring backlinks requires a lot of things to do, involving checking the quality of the partner’s website as well as negotiating links acquisition.

Paying for backlinks are not recommended, and asking for link exchanges are leaving a Web Consultant to feel like a beggar (!) – a very daunting task.

Clients’ schedule

Clients of a Web Consultant are very busy. Add to this fact, the bigger the clients’ size, the more ‘procedures’ they have to meet in order to implement the results of link building activities.

For example, suppose you have found a website that is the best match for your client’s. You need to respond fast in order to secure the ‘deal’ – And this is often not achievable, as getting a response to some clients take a longer time than some others.

Static Sites

With the advent of dynamic linking and content, static sites are facing more and more difficult task. For instance, bloggers are generally link to interesting articles in their blogs, and those are available in abundance every day.

As changes are implemented slowly, the majority of websites on the Net today are static, 5-6 pages, websites. In general, not many clients want to link to these static sites – this limit choices a Web Consultant has.

Clients’ misled assumption about how the Internet works

Many decision makers are misled and misinformed about how the Internet works. Believe it or not, they believe that their company websites should not open to any third party links, even advertisements.

Influencing them to allow their company websites to accept third party links is a difficult task.

Take heed!

Although the link building challenges above seem putting Web Marketing Consultants in a difficult position to do the job well, you have to learn the fact that link building is not as easy as you might think.

Those difficulties prove that link building is worth doing and that’s why companies pay a lot of money for SEO and link building purpose.

Can you actually bootstrap link building campaign? Yes. You can actually do it yourself, if you know what you are doing. You can even be a well-paid Web Marketing Consultant yourself to take clients’ websites to a better position in SERPs. Learn how to do link building.

Image by exfordy.

Link building is no longer a ‘fancy stuff’ for website owners - it is a requirement for them. The importance of this come to a point that if you neglect it, you will not be able to succeed in today’s competition to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Working hard on link building by submitting your websites to every possible search engines and websites you can imagine is no longer doable; Ranked high in SERPs for a certain keyword is not possible today without working smart for it.

You certainly need to develop a link building policy for your websites that act as your roadmap to develop your websites’ SERPs placement continuously. A detailed roadmap is very important as doing link building in random manner will only waste your valuable resources.

To rank high in SERPs, you need to watch your website’s link popularity. Many people mistakenly believe that having many sites referring and pointing to their homepage is all that matters in link building. This is not true; You need to watch your inner pages, not only your ‘index’ page, link popularity if you want to rank well.

How do you quantify link building? The numeric measurement of your link building campaign and your website’s link popularity is back link.

Back link, in essence, is a term to illustrate incoming link from other websites to your website. Typically, they include your website address in their websites. The more related their websites to yours, the more valuable the back link is.

Each web page inside your website must receive the same priority as your website’s homepage. There are double benefits in this – First, each page is contributing to your entire link building process. Second, having your pages also rank high on certain keyword will allow you to have multiple “doorway” that will bring visitors to your website, thus increasing traffic.

All in all, link building is important, as having your website ranked on the first page in search results is a world of difference from having yours ranked on the third or fourth page. Ranked on the first page will give you more exposure, more traffic, and eventually more conversion for your website (and business.)

Image by di_the_huntress.