Link Building – Strategic Planning is Essential

Aggressive link building should be part of your strategy to increase traffic to your website. Why? Simply put, the more highly relevant inbound links you have pointing to your website the higher your Page Rank, which means higher traffic to your website.

Link building can be a very time consuming and tedious process, but the potential upside in higher page rank and increased traffic makes it well worth the effort. This is why some people prefer to buy high PR links and some opts for the Link building Services for this. Having a well planned and executed link building campaign will most certainly payoff in the long-term.

So just how many inbound links do you need to get high rankings? That depends on the number of inbound links your higher-ranking competitors have. If your competitor has only 20 inbound links to their website, you can obtain a higher Page Rank score by securing 30 links to your website. However, if your competitor has hundreds of links, then that’s your target number to beat.

What is Page Rank?

Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is taken into account when a page’s Page Rank is calculated.

Page Rank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Remember, it’s not just the total number of links that’s important, it’s also the quality of the sites linking to you, the anchor text used in the link and the relevance of their content to your audience that counts.

Research Your Competitors

There are several tools available today on the internet for doing link research. Simply perform a keyword search in any search engine for ‘link analysis tool’ and you are sure to find several offerings.

Whichever link analysis tool you choose to use, here are a few important factors you should determine in your research:

* Where your Competitors ranks in the Search Engines
* Their number of incoming links
* What keywords are in the titles of their linking pages
* Percentage of links containing keywords in the link text
* The Page Rank of linking pages

Request Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links are based on an agreement by two sites to link to each other. Site owners as an inexpensive way to increase website traffic and link popularity often use reciprocal linking.

Reciprocal links are great for ensuring quality and relevant content is linking to your website. When looking for link candidates, start by searching your keywords on major search engines. You will no doubt see several of websites that compete with yours, but try to find the non-competing, complementary sites.

Visit and screen these sites carefully, selecting only those likely to be open to your link request. Provide them with a good reason to link to your website. I would even suggest linking to them first, which could improve your chances of getting a reciprocal link. But don’t just request a link exchange, give them a reason to link to your site. Show them where a reciprocal link would be mutually beneficial.

Be sure to target respected and popular sites that are relevant to your target audience. If you want to take it one step further, identify well-established sites with good content that targets the same audience you want to reach. Perform a link analysis on that site, noting the incoming links and soliciting the best non-competing sites.

Promote External Links

A great website not only has well-presented and relevant content, but also provides the user with additional resources and information located on other websites. Therefore, you want to include quality resources and appropriate outgoing links, including links to search engines, news hubs, blogs, industry resources, etc. External links are important for two reasons: they provide incentive for other quality sites to link to yours, and they can improve your Page Rank score if linkage is done properly.

Publish Articles

As an expert on your websites subject matter, consider writing business articles for your target audience, submitting the articles to appropriate online publications. Include your website URL in the content and request that the article appear with your website link. This can generate multiple inbound links and also help promote additional traffic to your website.

Create Testimonials

Develop a testimonial page on your website giving users an opportunity to post their own testimonial. If a user enjoys your site and it’s content, that user might be inclined to include a like to your website on their website or blog. Testimonials are a great way to interact with your users and also provide valuable feedback on the content of your site.

If you admire a similar but non-competing website, contact the webmaster explaining why you value the content. Don’t be surprised if you get a request for permission to display your comments on their Web site. Perfect! You can then grant them permission provided they agree to link to your site. It can also help to post the testimonial on your site, referring them to it.

Post Comments to Discussion Forums and Blogs

This is an easy way to get a link from discussion forums relevant to your website content. Be sure to include your URL in your post. Many of the modern Link building Services have this included in their services.

Create Links From Other Sites You Own

If you own and manage additional sites with unique but similar content, be sure to link them to your main site. Make sure the anchor text in your link is relevant to the target pages content.

Create Social Network Profiles

Several social networking websites allow you to insert a link to your website on the profile page. Not only does this provide additional inbound links, it also increases your ‘digital footprint’ and can potentially result in more visitors to your website.

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