Link Building Strategies for Online Promotion

If you've spent any time reading up on search engine optimization and Google PageRank then you know how important link building is for the success of your niche website. Without getting too detailed and verbose, link building basically raises your credibility in the search engines, allowing you to appear higher in the result pages. You'll also gain a stream of referral traffic from users who click on your links and head to your site directly.

Knowing that building backlinks to your site is extremely important, you should familiarize yourself with some classic link building strategies. You'll have to mix in all of these different tactics in order to maximize your success, and you'll find that they all aren't appropriate for every situation.

Link Exchanges

Link exchanges used to be one of the main ways in which people promoted their websites around the web. Today, link exchanges have decreased in value. One-way links are more valuable than two-way links, especially when websites throw any and everything up onto an all encompassing Links page. Still, link exchanges can serve a purpose as long as you exchange with high quality sites which are focused on similar topics.

Web Directories

Using web directories is another old school link building method which has since gone out of vogue a bit. As with link exchanges, submitting yourself to some web directories, especially ones related to your niche, can still be valuable. Additionally if you can get listed in a major directory such as dmoz then you could expect a big boost.

Blog Commenting and Forum Posting

Blog commenting and forum posting are very similar to one another. In both cases you are essentially immersing yourself into your niche community to establish your presence. If you actually have intelligent things to say, people will welcome the chance to view your site for more information and you'll build a solid reputation while also building up an increasingly large number of backlinks. However, if all you are doing is slapping your link around right and left you can expect to not see any positive results as you get ignored and potentially banned from different services.

Social Networking

Social networking has of course exploded over the last several years. There are many different types of web 2.0 services, ranging from the profile or friend sites such as MySpace and Facebook; to the link sharing sites such as Digg and Propeller; to media sites such as YouTube and Flickr; and random services such as Second Life and Twitter.

All of them work in different ways, and you'll need to experiment to see which services have applications that can work with your particular niche. Perhaps even more so than with blog commenting or forum posting, you'll need to be providing something of value to the community besides just distributing links on autopilot.

Article Marketing and Video Marketing

Article marketing and video marketing are very much alike. In both cases you are providing information that your target market would hopefully find interesting, engaging and useful. In the process, you get to include links in resource boxes and profile pages, while you also work on building up your status and reputation within your niche.

Natural Links

Natural links represent the most valuable incoming links that you can create for yourself. The problem is, you can't directly create them... you can only hope to work towards them. A natural incoming link is when someone checks out your site and finds something particularly useful or interesting, and then links to you just to pass on what they found and enjoyed. Since you didn't do any work for this, besides creating high quality website content, it's classified as a "natural" link.

The quality and quantity of backlinks you have leading to your website is extremely important to your overall online success. It's a key element of search engine optimization and online marketing and it cannot be overlooked. Familiarize yourself with these basic link building strategies and you'll begin to work your way up the crowded search engine results pages.