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Link Building is a Must

One way search engines decide where to rank your site is how much “link juice” you have. Link juice is the slang term used that basically means ‘how many sites that point to your site’. One way to get great inbound links is to publish totally unique content which other webmasters will feel compelled to share. This of course is easier said than done.

Another way to generate incoming links is to find blog posts which allow comments. If the comment form for that post has a section labeled “website” where you can enter your site url along with your comment, you’ve struck gold. Some advice which will help your comment be approved is:

1. Actually read the article or part of the article so your comment is relevant.
2. Ask a question about something within the content. The publisher is more likely to approve the comment if there is a chance for them to answer the question and flesh out the content even more.
3. Use a human name for the name section and don’t just put in your desired keyword. Yes it would be ideal to have a keyword link to your site, but these comments submissions are often nixed by the publisher of the article. If you see other comments using keywords then feel free to use a keyword instead of your name. This is a jackpot.

I spend three days of the month where I do nothing but comment on other blogs and  link to my SEO client’s websites. I keep a .txt log of all the pages where I comment and these lists are available to my customers upon demand.

There are claims by others SEO’s and even folks who work at search engines that these links dont do anything to improve your search ranking. But I can tell you that in my experience even “no-follow” links help your ranking.

Link Purchasing

Link purchasing is a no-no in Google’s eyes. It’s an attempt to game the system. They strongly advise against it. But there is a big grey market which does nothing but deal in the selling and purchasing of links. If the link looks and feels natural, a search engine cannot tell the difference.

Usually link purchasers want the following guarantees:

1. The link will be “do-follow”
2. The link will appear natural within the content of the site.
3.  The article is linked to at some point from the homepage.
4. The article will stay live indefinitely.

This is one way many webmasters with highly ranked websites are able to monetize their property. The other two ways are

1. Selling a product.
2. Selling advertising space.

If you have a large budget, buying links will definitely come up in conversation at some point. They typically sell for between $40-$200, depending on the content type and ranking of the seller’s site.

Link Exchange

You can contact webmasters and ask them about exchanging links. Many are wiling to do this. We have a linking page of our own.

Remember the golden rule: Do onto others.. yada yada yada. If someone is trying to link to their site from your blog, approve the comment unless it is totally spammy. It will not hurt your page rank whatsoever.

Conclusion

Inbound link building is an important facet to having a strong SEO campaign. If content is king then link building is its prince.