Starting a Link Building Program For Your Online Business

If you have an online business then you want to make sure that you get as much traffic to your website as possible. If not, you won’t get customers in large enough numbers to make your business thrive. So, how can you get more traffic to your website? Part of that answer is to start a link building program.

Preparing For the Link Building Process

• When you get ready to put together a link building program for your business website, there are some important considerations.
• You must make sure that there is nothing in the structure of your websites that stops the search engine spiders and robots from reading its content.
• Make sure your pages are targeted to current trends that people want to read about.
• Research your competition. It is very imperative to know what you need to do better and sell more products than other similar companies. Compare the contents of their websites with what is on yours such as the topics, number of pages, verbiage, etc.
• Be sure to monitor how fast the growth of links to those competitors is going to see if they are moving ahead of you or not. Plus, just because a website is linked to your competitor doesn’t mean you can’t also link to it as well.
  

Growing Your Links

Don’t try to speed into building links to your website. You don’t want to have a whole bunch of links that aren’t ones that promote your business properly. If you get between 40-60 new links a month, this is a very good start.

How to Get Links

So, now you understand that links are important. But, how does a site get links?

First, some good ways to get the resources you need to learn about link creating is to read posts on SEO forums. Here is an example of an SEO forum that give advice on links and other info you need to help your website get traffic. This can help you to find ideas on forming and getting links to your site from other places.

The best kinds of links are those you can get for free, since your business is in the market for making money. Some ways to get free links are:

Get your writers busy and submit some questions or answers on Yahoo Answers that link back to your site. They can also write stories for sites like GoArticles with information about your products and links back to your website. There are other free places you can upload stories as well including EZines, or Digg.

You can also create a page for your company on Wikepedia and add links to your site.

Find a forum such as http://forums.seo.com/ or http://forums.seochat.com/. Most of these will let you post comments and also add a link to your site.

These and similar tasks will help to get you started off on the right foot to building links to your website. You want to also inspire others to include your site link in their stories, blog posts or forum postings. You do this by doing things like creating a list of subject matter experts. If you make them happy, they may post something about your site onto theirs and that too helps you build up your links.

Other things you can do is buy traffic with a pay per click website deal,  use things like social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), or try linking to directories or meme trackers such as DMOZ or  you can start a blog and if you put your site on Del.icio.us popular list it can attract bloggers to you.

All in all there are many ways to get links to your site, just try a few to get started and soon you will be getting more traffic to your site.

If you have resources that you find helpful lets know and we may publish them here. The follow up article to this resource will be on setting up a link building template to organize your link process.

These are a collection of articles on the How To: of Link Building for 2009. This list was compiled from several websites of leading industry professionals. It is a good place to get started and revisit when defining your objectives, strategy, Do’s and Don’ts of your link program.These articles range from the beginner to the advanced.

1. The Fundamentals of Link Building: by Adam Audette.

2. Link Building: A Complete Walkthrough: by  Saad Kamal’s.

3. The Ultimate Guide to Internal Linking: and Part 2: by Pete Wailes.

4. The Definitive List of Link Building Techniques: by Jeff Quipp.

5. 11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out: by Rae Hoffman.

6. Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts: by Stoney deGeyter

7. Where Do You Start Your Link Marketing Campaign?: by Wiep Knol.

8. 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity: by Aaron Wall

9. 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies: by Search Engine watch

10. Link Building from A to Z: by SeoMoz

11. A Link Building Method So Effective I Can’t Believe It’s Not Blackhat:SeoMoz

12. There’s No Such Thing as a Worthless Link: by Deb Mastaler

13. The 30 Easiest Was to Get Links and Exposure: by SeOptimise

14. Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics for 2009: by Wiep

15. 30 Ways to Get Links Naturally and Stop Link Building: by SeOptimize

Please let me know your comments or suggestions for new valuable additions that would benefit our readers.

This title looks backwards because we always see “Link Building” but don’t often see the definition of “building link relationships”.

There is a particularly good article about the basics of online small business development. Matt McGee’s most recent article, “Meet the Press, Talking SEO’s” provides a good example of an online small business combining some SEO basics,  “How to get started”, and another important element, Search Engine Marketing ; you have to promote your site!

The latter is most important because, as I mention to an artist/client the other day, we now have to promote your site so that people can find your work. There are thousands of websites going up every day so you need to have a strategy and action plan to build your web traffic and ultimately your sales.

I went on to discuss some of the more traditional marketing methods that could help promote his business website, including: making direct contact with art companies and seeing if there was some value in having a link relationship. Without going into detail on link building methods, (there are some great resources further on in this article) I rather see link building as an extension of relationship building…..or link relationships.

Having been involved in a few business Startup’s one of things that websites have in common is that you need to reach out and build the key relationships that will be the foundation for your business later on. The parallel analog of link relationships to Relationship building, (often used when referencing sales or business development) is that in order to build good, deep links, you need to represent a value to the website owner  who is being requested to link to your site. While this seems simple enough I thought it was worth a few words since I have had to sift through an unseemly amount of search garbage discussing all sorts of methods of building links in order to build traffic. People quite often seem to look for the easy route or short cut which in the end is never long lasting or worth the effort.

One clear strategy I find useful and valuable is to provide good article content that is relevant to the target market of the business you are reaching out to. In other words if you have some good stuff and it can help the person you have called or emailed then there is good chance he will link to you. Put in sales terms, if you identify the need of the website owner, he is much more likely to buy. And if you haven’t identified the need then don’t waste your time or his/hers.

In the end, it will take longer, but I find if you stick with common business sense and focus on building quality link relationships with an objective, strategy and action plan you will end up with more solid long lasting links and sites promoting you and building your business.

Here is a list of my Top 12 Link Building Tools.

A couple of good articles to help you get; A comprehensive and fast start to link building:

131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies: This is a bit dated but a very good read put together by some well known link building authorities.

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity: This more recent link building list by Seo Book gives good straight forward easy to read information you can apply very easily today.

Internal link tactics, List strategies and, Link building starters.

While on the pursuit of continuous link building education I found several sites that had some great lists. Lists being the operative word. Link to the Top 30 Link Building strategies.

Being a small business owner my goal is to usually find information that is concise, to the point and “on target with the topic I am researching. Since I work in the rapidly evolving field of SEO and Search Marketing, it is not my intention to debate over which list is better but to give you the information to form your own strategy. But a strategy you need, and getting started now is in your favor.

There is not one strategy that fits all. Our clients range from Artist’s to Tile distributors. Content is different, industry is different and so should the link building strategy be different.

This comparative link building list is derived from articles, written in 2009, by 3 current SEO and Search Marketing specialists.There are several more. To see a list of 15 Top SEO articles we follow, visit Search Marketing . For a complete list of all link building strategies visit these sources below.

While there are many more top “Do’s” and “Don’t's in Link Building, if you concentrate on what valuable time you have on these top strategies and tactic’s you will fast forward your progress to a better search engine rank; and with a defined website conversion strategy, (discussed in up coming articles) more business.

Let us know if this article was helpful and what link building strategy is working for you.