Link Building 101: Linking Strategies for New Webmasters

If you didn't already know it, link building is considered one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) today. While on page elements of your website; such as the title tag, page names, the use of headings and the actual page content of your website are very important; relevant link building can do more for a website than proper on page optimization can, at least in terms of gaining rankings for competitive keywords and keyword phrases.

Here we will discuss some effective and ethical link building strategies for your website. While some link building methods will offer better results than others; each method outlined here can help webmasters to increase the chances of getting their websites to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for their intended keywords.

Getting your website indexed (listed in search engines)

Anymore, submitting your website directly to search engines is unnecessary, and with specific regards to major search engines; it's just a waste of time. Search engines will crawl, and hopefully, index your website much faster simply by getting a well placed link on a website that is frequented by search engines spiders.

One way to get your website crawled and indexed quickly is by placing a link to your website on a popular classified ads website, such as craigslist.org.

Craigslist is broken down by countries, states and regions; and all you need to do is place an ad with a clickable link back to your website; preferably with keyword focused anchor text. Because the site is so popular, search engine robots crawl through the site all of the time; and this gives your website nearly instant exposure to search engine robots. In many cases, your website will be crawled and indexed within 7 days, and it's pretty common to even see your new website in Google within 48 hours of placing a link on craigslist.

Of course, you must adhere to the terms of the craigslist.org website; only place your link in the proper category and be sure that the people who live near the location where you post your ad will be able to benefit from what your website has to offer. Also, under no circumstances should you place your link in several different locations (cities, states) as this is expressly against the Craigslist's TOS.

Now, a link from a free classified ads website will only help you to get crawled initially; this type of "link building" method will have little to no long term affect for your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts.

Link building strategies with long term effects

Obviously, if you're going to spend time, energy or even money to acquire incoming links to your website, you really want the effects from the link building to last a while; preferably a long while. So - what link building strategies offer long-lasting effects? To name a few:

1) Article marketing (article directory submissions)

2) Directory submissions

3) Purchasing paid links

4) Blog postings

5) Forum postings

6) Blog comments

Each of these link building strategies can be used with varying degrees of success depending on a number of factors. However, not all of the listed methods will provide significant long term search engine rankings increases. While these types of link building methods are commonly discussed on popular webmaster's forums, there is a highly effective link building method that really doesn't get the attention it deserves, and we'll discuss that now.

Effective link building comes from supplying quality content on your website

So many webmasters and website owners completely ignore the positive, long term effects that producing quality content can have for their link building endeavors. We're not even referring to new webmasters; we're referring to established webmasters who should know better. The reasoning behind this is simple:

People naturally link to good content that is related to their website

For instance, if you have a website about day trading and you want to work on obtaining quality links to your website, then the most effective way to do this is to provide useful and well written content about day trading. When other website owners or bloggers stumble upon your website and they find your tips or service useful, they will naturally link to it because they want to provide helpful information for their website viewers. What this means for you is that you will not only get a link back from a related website, you will be getting a positive word of mouth referral from these other website owners. How can that be beat?

Link building starts with your website's content

You can use websites such as craigslist.org to get your website indexed in search engines, and you can perform directory submissions until your fingers are numb; but none of these link building strategies compare with the effects that can be felt from receiving natural links from related website owners who think your website has something special to offer; at least something worth talking about. Effective link building starts with creating content that is worth linking to. When you can master this aspect of link building, you will be miles ahead of your competitors and the search engines will thank you for it.