Link Building Strategies For 2010

With the new year upon us, I hope we all had a very profitable financial 2009. In 2010, I am sure many of you business-minded individuals had the resolution to build up your business and make more money from the internet. Well, the best kind of visitors are those that come from the search engines because they are the most opted to buy something, so that is still the focus for this year. Search engines have been changing a lot with Google starting to index videos, and then Twitter results. With all of these search engine optimization changes in our industry, it can be hard to keep up with.

The matter of fact is that link building is one thing that has not dramatically changed. The more websites that you can get to link to you, the higher your website will rank in the search engines and the more visitors and customers your website will get. So how should we go about link building in 2010?

Well, my predictions are that this is the year that the Google toolbar pagerank will be dubbed worthless as it has been getting less and less effective and finding out which sites are of higher authority. Google is moving a lot more towards conversions and links that send traffic, however they are not ‘quite’ there yet, and until they are we can continue to build lots of little links quickly and reap the search engine benefits.

One link building method that will continue to be beneficial for many months and possibly years to come will be blog posts, because they accomplish so many things with one post. You reach a large bloggers audience and possibly his twitter/email syndication, you get a powerful backlink in the post, and you can get related links in your industry. The best part of this is guest posts are completely free and only require you to be up to date in your industry and you to be actually passionate about it. There are large blogs in nearly every niche in the world, so go start searching for flagship blogs that you can start writing for in your industry, and start leveraging off their success to build up your blog to their size, and then in good faith, offer your readers the ability to guest post off your success.

3 Things To Look For When Building Links

Building links should be the corner stone of any SEO campaign.

1. One Way Links

This became important after all the link exchange programs started sprouting up in hopes of manipulating search results. For a while it worked. Now, the best kind of link is not recipricol. One way links only please.

2. Backlinks To Linking Site

You will want to check the backlinks pointing into a site when considering it for a linking partner. No pagerank isnt everything, but it might be a good indication of the quality of links a site has pointing into it.

Remember, neighborhoods are important. So associate with quality sites. And don’t be afraid to link to quality when it makes sense for your reader.

3. Number of outbound Links On Linking Page

The more links pointing out, the less juice a link has. That’s the bottom line. It’s always best to have as few outbounds as possible on a page where you’re placing your link. However, it should be said that a link is a link, so don’t be too picky about outbounds, unless you’re paying for the placement.

PRO TIP:
The best links are the ones that occur naturally, because you have a good website with quality content.

Good luck and happy link building!

This is a guest post from our friends at Top Click Media.  Please visit their site for more search engine optimisation information.

Having Relevancy in your Link Building

When most people argue about link building in the dozens of popular webmaster forums around the internet, the usual fight is about whether it is better to get a handful of quality high pagerank backlinks or thousands of little low pagerank links to get your site to the coveted number one spot in Google. While it is extremely beneficial to have both a good handful of high pagerank links to influence your link popularity and internal pages pagerank, and at the same time, have thousands of lesser quality links to get the best of both worlds, neither argument is correct.

Ultimately, the best kind of link you can get is one that is of decent pagerank but is extremely relevant to your niche. Google’s algorithm is moving more and more towards being relevancy based, because that is how they can filter out spammy websites easier than truthful ones. Imagine owning a website that talks about weight loss but the only backlinks the websites have are from porn or gambling websites. Google knows that these links are not all legitimate, and so since they are not relevant they are not as strong.

Now imagine a small niche weight loss site with dozens of PR1-4 links from highly relevant weight loss blogs. Google knows that the weight loss blogs have good authority and are making content-relevant posts talking about your weight loss site and so these links will be far more beneficial than a single PR6 link from a gambling site.

The diamond in the rough is being able to get the highly authoritative and high pagerank websites that are relevant to your niche, which are the best of both worlds.

How Important are Incoming Links

If you have a Web site, you know that people need to be able to find it. In order for them to do that, you not only have to get the word out there but you also have to make people see that what you have is important when it comes to what they are looking for.

Inbound links can help raise your chances of getting a better ranking in the search engines, but only if they have relevance to your site and if they come from sites that are also high-ranking. Both of these things are important, and which one is more important is arguable. In the past it was believed that the page ranks of inbound links were more important than anything, but many of the larger search engines have since changed their algorithms.

With that being the case, the relevance of the sites that are giving you inbound links and the keywords that they use are becoming more significant than the page rank of the sites that offer the links. One thing is clear, however: getting inbound links to your site from relevant sites is crucial if you want to succeed and see your page rank rise.

One Way Links From an eBay Store

If you are into search engine optimization (SEO) then you know the importance of one way links. Reciprocal linking (or trading links) with relevant websites is still useful but one way linking has become increasingly important to online visibility. Obtaining high quality inbound links to your website without offering a link in return is tough work, and not always free. You have to be willing to set aside a reasonable budget for link building, but it is well worth the money and it is the smartest SEO investment you can make.

Popular ways of obtaining one way links to your website:

• Directory listings – some are free, some you must buy (usually permanent)
• Blog / Forum postings – social media/viral marketing

One way of acquiring backlinks to your site that is often overlooked and hardly ever talked about is from an eBay Store. eBay actually setup their store pages to be quite search engine friendly, which ecommerce marketing specialists can use to their advantage. They let you specify the titles and keywords for all of your category pages. With a basic eBay Store subscription you are allowed to create 5 custom store pages. These pages are automatically built into the navigation of your store and quickly become indexed by the search engines. You can then deep link to pages within your website from the text on these custom pages in your ebay store.

SEO benefits of an eBay Store:

• Ability to specify titles and keywords for category pages
• Search engines love eBay listings
• Deep linking to pages within your website (one way links)
  
• Ability to control the anchor text of these backlinks
  

eBay has some strict policies regarding linking to external websites from listings or store pages. You must only link to outside pages that do not directly offer the same or similar items for sale (example: you can’t link to a product page on your website from your ebay store if the webpage shows a ‘buy now’ button or any prices)

It is wise to limit the outbound links on your ebay store pages to 3 or less per page. This would be about 15 total links from your ebay store to different pages on your website. A smart thing to do would be to link to the homepage on your website with about 5 of those links and with the remaining 10 link to different pages within your site (i.e. category pages or informational pages).

When you figure that a basic eBay Store will cost you $15.95 per month you can imagine what a great investment it is – not to mention you will probably sell your items as well. 15 one way inbound links for under twenty bucks? you can’t beat that.

The whole point of everything mentioned above is to improve search engine rankings and ultimately the online exposure of your business. The more keyword-rich backlinks you have pointing to your website the higher you will rank. Spend the extra time on your link building… it could be the single most important factor in search engine optimization.