Link Building Tips for Beginners

If you have a website, you'll know that one of the most important aspects to improve your search engine rankings - and therefore increase your visitors and customers - is to have strong search engine optimization, or SEO. This will use keyword phrases and specialist marketing techniques to get your site higher up the search engine rankings. However, there's another highly effective method, and it's just as important - link building.

What is Link Building?
Just as the name suggests, link building allows you to build quality links into your website from other websites. This raises your profile because links show that people are visiting your site often - and the more visitors a site has, the higher up the search engine rankings it will go.

This is because Google and the other search engines believe that the more quality links a site has coming into it, the more useful the content of that site must be, so it places you higher up the rankings to encourage people to visit you. However, you can't just use any links - indeed, if you have too many worthless links, you might end up being penalized by Google if they feel you're trying to beat the system. So how do you link build and stay on the right side of the major search engines?

Some of the best ways to increase the amount of quality links to your website include:

- Request links from websites that complement your service or product. If you sell educational tools, ask universities and online colleges to link to you.
- Register your site with directories for incoming links.
- Offer reciprocal links. For each company that links to you, you'll do the same for their company website.
- Write articles to put on your website, either as latest news or as expert tips, and submit them to article directories like Ezine.com or Quality Content. Not only is fresh, quality content great linkbait, you can create incoming links yourself by submitting your content to article sites. One thing to watch out for, however: If you want an article on your site to rank well, submitting it to article sites that have a higher Google PageRank (PR) than your site may hinder those efforts - the article site may rank higher for your article than your own site!
- Use press releases. These are becoming increasingly effective and important at driving traffic to your site - if you have a news story to tell, write a press release with a link back to your website, and then have it published on one of the numerous press release sites online, like Press Release PR or PRWeb.
- Buying links. While this strategy has come under fire in recent months and has even resulted in Google penalizing websites that buy and sell links for SEO (what has been known as the infamous "Google PR Smackdown"), you can still buy a few links here and there. Just don't buy a lot at one time, and make sure the site where you're buying a link is highly relevant to your site. Also, if you're going to buy a link, make sure it's on a page that has a Google PageRank (PR) of 5 or higher.

These are just some of the ways you can increase the links into your website. If you want, you can also ask friends and colleagues to link to you, if they have a blog or website of their own. As long as the website linking to you has some value, and isn't regarded as a porn or gambling site, then you'll soon see your ranking increase on the all-important major search engines.