4 Kinds of Link Building Campaigns

Anyone that has spent any time studying SEO, researching algorithms or reading internet marketing blogs and forums knows that link building plays a huge role in a website’s marketing campaign. If for some reason you didn’t know that link building was such a big deal, then it’s imperative for me to tell you now. Backlinks (links pointing to your website) are considered web votes in the search engine popularity/ranking formulas. The more websites there are with links that lead to your site, the merrier. However, it does not stop there. Who links to you, why they link to you and what they say about you are arguably more important factors than how many websites “voted” for you.

There are 1,000’s of ways to build links back to your site and for a variety of reasons. Some will build links to increase rankings while others are looking to increase PageRank. Whatever the case may be, it is necessary that you understand the different types of link building.

Building Links to Increase Total Backlinks

In some industries, depending on the competition link building could entirely just be a popularity contest. For example, you could check the backlinks of your competitors rankings for the terms you are targeting and notice that they have over 100,000 backlinks compared to your 112. Also, for some search engines, having a plethora of links plays a role in your search engine positioning. Furthermore, the more links you have pointing to your site, the more paths you have for bots to find your site and to cache it. Building backlinks to increase your total in-link count in Yahoo or Google is usually done because this is something that can easily be seen by anyone online. Having a site that only has 50 backlinks says a lot. Much can be said about a site with over 40,000 links as well.

A few techniques to increase total backlinks include site-wide link building, blog rolls on blogs with a lot of posts, directory submitting and article distribution.

Building Links to Increase PageRank

Although you want a lot of sites to point to yours, you also want these sites to have high PageRanks. Google uses PageRank as a measure of importance. PageRank is an algorithm that measures how many sites are pointing to you and how many sites are pointing to those sites pointing to you and so on. Google still makes it clear that PageRank is the heart of their search engine algorithm, so getting links from websites with high Page Rank is a must. When you obtain links from sites with a lot of links pointing to them, it shows Google that a trusted domain has linked to you. Another reason you may want to increase your PageRank is because you want to sell advertising placements or blog reviews and noticed that the higher the PR of your site, the more money you can charge.

This form of link building is a very common technique performed by directories. They buy links from pages with a lot of PR to inflate their PR so webmasters will want to pay for inclusion into their directories.

A few techniques to increase PR fast is to get links from sites with a PR4 or better, sitewide/blogroll links, social bookmarking, mass press releasing, text link buying and link baiting.

Building Links that Increase Search Engine Rankings

As mentioned before, backlinks counts as votes. However it is not only the number and type of backlinks that matter, what they say about you could make all the difference in the world when it comes to search engine positioning. The anchor texts of your links are labels that help the search engines bots categorize and rank your site according to relevance. Sometimes getting a few links saying the keywords you’re going after can go a lot further than how many links you may have. So if you are looking to build links to increase search engine visibility, find relevant sites to give you links saying the keywords you’re going after for optimal keyword placement.

A few techniques to increase rankings are niche directory submissions, article distribution, link exchanges, blog reviews, links from sites already ranking for terms you’re targeting, and press releases.

Building Links that Generate traffic

So we can build links to increase PR and we can build links to improve our rankings. However, isn’t the ultimate goal to generate traffic? It’s easy to build links to indirectly generate traffic via the SERP’s and to forget about generating links that send visitors. While some links may increase your PR or even help your search engine positions, links that send relevant traffic directly to your site from a site related to yours could be a better investment than building links in hopes to get some love from the search engines’ proprietary algorithms.

A few ways to generate traffic via backlinks, is through affiliate marketing, paid links, links on pages with top Alexa rankings, reviews from bloggers with a lot of subscribers, forums in your industry, social networking and press releases.

While all of these techniques are valid, the important thing to remember is that major search engines like websites that generate traffic naturally. So not only do you have to figure out which route you want to take (if not all of them), you should also devised strategies that will give your website a natural link building profile.


Backlink tips provided by James Harrison; Link Building Expert & Online Marketing Specialist.

Free Online Business Promotion

It amazes me how many small business owners who come to me for Search Engine Optimization for their already existing website haven't done one of the simplest things, one thing I consider to be a first step in building your business' online presence.

As a business owner that is always looking to reach new customers your website is a very important part of making yourself available to servicing your customers needs. But if nobody knows about your website then it isn’t being effective in bringing in new customers.

In the old days a brick and mortar type business would set up shop and invest in an advertisement in the local phone book to bring in customers from the surrounding area. To be honest, not much has changed. Sure, you may not have a physical business location but the popularity and terrific potential of the local phone book is still a massive customer building option.

Phone book advertising can be expensive. The costs of printing and delivering hundreds of thousands of phone books to every residence have to be paid and those costs are pushed onto the business owner looking to make a decent return on their investment.

But on the internet publishing costs can be minimal, allowing the major phone book companies to give away free phone book listings.

That’s right Free!

Why? Because they want to have a useful web presence to keep visitors coming back and because they want to know about your business so they can attempt to sell you on upgrades and more expensive packages.

In the mean time your business name, website address and maybe even phone number are getting out there to potential customers looking for your type of service or product at no extra cost to you.

The best part is that there are only four major Business Directories which make up the largest segment of online traffic and they all offer free listings for your small business website.

They are:
http://www.askmryellow.com/home.php
http://www.bizweb.com/
http://www.superpages.com/
http://www.yellowpages.com/

I can’t recommend Yellow Pages enough. It has shown me a great customer response and it is the only Free Business Directory that creates a backlink to your website which is indexed by the search engines.

And as any business website owner should know generating backlinks is imperative in search engine placement and ranking for your business related keywords. To add icing to the cake YellowPages.com is a Page Rank 8 website.

So if you are online to make money and expand your existing business by exposing yourself to new customers then the free business listings with the phone book directories can not be ignored.pages is the only one that creates a backlink to your website