Inbound Link Building

Link Building has been described by some as one of the more important elements in driving your site up the search engine rankings. The theory as that the more links you have to your website the higher you would climb. Sadly this theory is no longer true and just collecting a huge amount of links could if fact see you site removed from any search engine rankings.

So the secret is to try and build consistent relevant links to your website. Also not all links are created the same. Confusing eh?

This hub will highlight some of the different ways to attract links to your site. Don;t just use one of these techniques but try and mix it up for best results.

One of the best ways we know to get quick inbound links and traffic is to write and submit articles to Article Directory sites. There are lots of sites which are set up just to collect content. They allow visitors to copy the content and use it on their own websites. While they are used by lots of site owners they still add value in 3 ways.

1. You get inbound links to your site
2. People do read these sites so you will get a small amount of direct traffic
3. These article sites do rank themselves in google and they could drive you search engine traffic directly.

NOTE: I would suggest that these articles are different articles to the ones that you add to your site. We are trying to avoid any possible current or future duplicate content filters.

Ideas for Content Articles

• Industry News
• Industry Changes

• Product Changes

• Consumer Issues

• Consumer Advice
• Comment on other company news

• Expanded FAQs

• Q&As

• Case Studies

• Technical Articles (How to...)

• Keyword Focused

If you do not have the time to write articles you can outsource them to a ghost writer.

You can find writers on iFreelance, Rentacoder or Elance or even Craigslist or Ebay if you look. We have been using Rentacoder for 5 years now without any problems.

Once the article is written then you will need to submit it to the sites listed below.

You will add a resource box at the bottom of each article and it is here that you will be able to add links directly to your site. Normally you can have two links so use one for the home page and one for a product page. Keep them relevant.

You could use an automatic article submission tool, which are great tools to automate the process of submitting articles to all these directories. But to be honest you will probably best off just finding 5 or 6 main article directories and also 5 niche article directories relevant to your website.

Some article directories to get you going:

www.ezinearticles.com

www.goarticles.com

www.articledashboard.com

www.amazines.net

Press Releases are a great way of getting inbound one way links from Newswires and it may also get picked up by Google News. You will not only get inbound links but real traffic directly from the stories you publish.

You could also find that some news websites or sites relevant to your niche have a news section. They may publish your newsstory with a link back to you site.

We only tend to publish Press Releases online although you could send them to the national / regional press as well.

Ideas for Press Releases

• Statistics
• Convert articles into Press Releases
• Issue Releases in response to other companies' Press Releases
• Subscribe to Google News and register for News Alerts for all your major keywords. This will then send you an email once a day with the latest stories relating to your keywords.
• Visit PRWeb and use their Search Engine to get an idea of what other companies are writing about.

Most of the time, the links that are generated here will be direct to your home page.

The best place to start submitting Press Releases is to PRWeb. They now have removed their free listings so you have to pay $80 per release minimum depending on the bonus features you can apply. PRWeb is scraped by Google nearly five times a day so getting a release published here is a great way of getting traffic and ranking.

NEW SITE TIP : one of the fastest ways to get a new site visited by Google is to submit a press release. PR Web will cost your $80 but you could also try using a UK site called Press Box. Press Box will get your site visited by Google in a couple of days if not sooner and what's more submitting a press release there is free.

Press Release Sites

www.prweb.com

www.pressbox.co.uk

These are a great way of building inbound links. Some charge a fee and some are free.

For fee paying links we would definitely recommend paying to be listed in the Yahoo! Directory.

We also recommend that you only add 5 - 10 submissions per day. One, because it really is soul destroying work! And secondly, it will keep you under the radar for large link increases.

We also suggest that you vary the link text for each entry. Build five keyword links and descriptions.

All the links for Web Directories will link to your home page but still mix up the link text. This works better than anything else and shows you are building links naturally.

We have found a fantastic piece of Software which will help you submit to over 650 directories pretty much automatically and they constantly update the number for directories they use. When we first used it when they had 400, now they have 650 and it grows all the time.

Check it out here: Directory Submitter

It is not just web directories we want to submit to. Do you have a blog? Submit that to Blog based directories. Have a newsletter? Submit it to Ezine directories. Have a forum? Submit it to Forum Directories and if you offer a freebie then list it with the Freebie directories.

This will drive you lots more links and more important relevant traffic.

One way to accumulate a range of one way inbound links quickly is to buy links. This practice is frowned upon by some and also some of the major search engines don't like it but it is proven to be successful as part of a rounded link building campaign.

Our advice is that if you are going to buy links then make sure it only accounts for around a maximum of 25% of your inbound links.

Therefore make sure you are using some of the other techniques we are sharing on this hub.

One of the best places to get links is Text Link Ads