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Link Building
All about link building
Having a good placement of external links in general directories, niche directories and related sector sites is not only an excellent way to increase your rankings in Google, but can also generate targeted traffic for your website. A co-ordinated link building program will increase general awareness of your website, announce its presence to your target community on the Web and support search engine rankings.
What is link popularity?
It's simply a term used to describe the number of hypertext links coming into a website from other websites. This is a factor used by many top search engines (notably Google) to determine a website's ranking and is an important consideration for any website. To determine your sites' link popularity, just bring up the Google search, type in 'link:www.yoursite.com' and this will bring up all the relevant in-bound links to your site. Alternatively go to http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to see rankings across a number of engines.
How do search engines measure the quality of inbound links?
Links are measured in relevancy, and if Google picks up inbound links to your site from sites in your sector then they are considered relevant. If you have 1000's of links and your site is high in the organic listings your linking structure is sound. If you have 30 links, you're on page 20 of a Google search and your site is nowhere to be seen, you need to start building links.

There are 3 reasons why a site may want to link to yours. They may feel it has relevant content to their users, you pay them or you agree to have a reciprocal link. The most cost effective way is to find sites with the same theme as yours and ask to trade links.

A lot of site owners seem to fear linking to others sites. They fear that people will click on these "links" and lose their traffic! If masses of people are clicking on your outbound links, then there something integrally wrong with the site and it needs an overhaul.
What sort of links are best
  • Links on sites which have relevancy to the subject of your own website
  • Official sites like government, charity or university sites pull more weight with search engines
  • One way links are best, rather than two way reciprocal links
  • Links from long time established websites are perceived as being more authoritative and influential
    • Procuring links for your website
  • Generate a list of potential sites and contact details. A good starting point is to check what inbound links your competitors have, remember there's nothing wrong with rustling, so add those to your list. This practice also gives you a good indication of what types of site are relevant and likely to link to you.
  • Consider your contact approach. By phone or email; phone preferably as there is nothing like the human touch. You need a pitch to tell them how useful your link will be to their users, or/and offer a reciprocal link. Be polite and bear in mind you only have one shot at this, so get it right.
  • Try and come up with an angle that makes linking to your site more appealing to the proposed linking website.
  • Keep a date of which sites you have contacted and which are linking to you, wait for their response, no response, wait a couple of weeks and give it another try.
  • When you visit related sites, look to see if they offer guest books or forums. If they do, post a message, and include your URL in your signature.
    • It really can be that easy. It can be tedious and time consuming work finding sites, asking for links, following up the requests, verifying the links have been added. Most sites nowadays have never put the required effort into it.

    If you prepared to put in the effort you'll reap the rewards and gain a huge competitive advantage in the search engines. Relevant inbound links to your site will help increase your visibility in the search engines and deliver qualified search engine traffic.

    Alternatively speak to Business Without Borders about our linking programmes or simply for advice or fill in our online questionnaire and we'll come back to you with a quote.
    Tips and tricks for checking your link popularity
    To get a list of sites that are linking to you and your competitors, copy the following into each search engine's search fields:

    Google: link: http://www.yourwebsitename.com

    MSN: linkdomain:www.yourwebsitename.com

    All the Web: link:www.yourwebsitename.com

    Yahoo: link:http://www.yourwebsitename.com


    You can visit Market Leap to check all the search engines at once and also check who is linking to your competitors.

    http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/