Posts Tagged ‘link building’

A few weeks back, I was sitting in a round table discussion with some small business owners and I was trying to get some input from them to help guide the training on this site. One of the people at the table emphasized that link building should be a focus of any online marketing training, to which another responded “what’s a link?”  Too often, us techie types can totally skip over the basics and start using terms that are not familiar to the average person – the very group we are targeting.

With regard to Internet Marketing a link is simply a reference to your website from another website. Anytime you can click through from one website and land on another, that counts as a link to that website.

The real question is “why do links matter?” The reason they matter is because search engines like Google need a way to determine the relevance of a website. They have determined that measuring the quantity and quality of links to a website can give a good determination as to how important that website is, and therefore how well it should show up in the search engine results.

Here are some great places to get links from:

• Quality Search Engine Directories. There are lots of search engine directories that simply are not very relevant. Others such as Best of the Web and GoGuides offer valuable opportunities to be found, and therefore charge to be listed in their directories.
• Press and Media. If you put out a press release and it links to your website that is a good thing. Even better is if the media identifies you as a source and links to you.
• Trusted Websites and Blogs. When I say trusted, I am referring to a website that is trusted by the search engines to be a good source of information.  A great way to get a link from another website is to write an article for them. Many don’t accept articles, but many do.  Here are two resources to find sites or blogs that do accept articles:
  MyBlogGuest.com
  BloggerLinkUp.com

Getting good links is not always an easy thing. Don’t be enticed to take shortcuts however because the search engines (and Google in particular) spend lots of time monitoring for suspicious patterns of activity and paid links (that’s right, Google does not want you to directly pay for links.)

If you have any questions, feel free to post below. Happy Link Building!