Link Building 101

7. Link Solicitation

In the 7^th place in Don's notes is Link Solicitation. This is the orthodox, I link to you if you link to me. Practically, you will solicit links by sending a letter to a website's webmaster and ask them to exchange links with you. Sometimes if you are lucky, they would not ask for a payment but top ranking websites often do.

In choosing who you would link with, always remember one thing – quality is better than quantity. It doesn't matter how many you linked with and how many linked to you but to whom you are linked with and their rankings in search engines like of course the most famous, Google and its rival, the former best search engine, Yahoo.

Choose carefully the websites that you would link with, you don't want to be associated with the bad ones. They often get banned in search engines and websites affiliated with them often share the price.

6. Directory Submission

Remember that you have to do everything and I mean everything that could generate you more traffic so even though directory submission's effectivity is quite slow compared to the other techniques, doing this is a must. Renowned directory lists can be found here, here, and here.

5. Press Release

Either it's a press release or just a praise release, be sure that the words you chose in making one are convincing enough to lift people's index fingers and click the link. As the saying goes – there is no bad publicity, only good. What matters most is that you compelled people to click the link. Now, let's leave the rest to what they see after that.

4. Article Submission

Article submission takes a lot of time to do but worth the effort specially if you have interesting articles to share. This is because of the do follow. I would like to explain what do follow is but that would be another article, like this.

See what I just did? I linked you to another article. That's do follow.

3. Blog Comments

Ranked 3^rd in Don's notes is commenting on blogs. This, according to him can make or break your website, hence you need to carefully choose the blogs that you put comments on to avoid mistaken you as a spammer. For example, if you have a website about cellphones, don't comment and put the link of your website on a blog about prozac.

2. Forum Posting

The second best way of building links is through forum posting. I am one of the many believers of this method, take it from my journey of asking nosebleed questions using search engines. I will share with you a very memorable experience.

I borrowed from a friend a data CD containing applications for my LifeDrive. Very excited, I put the CD on my laptop, forgot to scan the CD and went on with copying and installing software to my PDA. Nothing happens but after a minute, McAfee detected a virus from the CD and my laptop went kaput. Panicking, I turned the laptop on again and to my surprise, the sound card of my laptop was corrupted!

With nobody there to help me, I resort by confiding my problem with Google. But what exactly am I looking for? So I asked Google, “What should I do if the sound card of my Toshiba gets corrupted?” and Google answered my question by leading me, guess where – to forums!

I clicked one of 'em forums and saw many people like me asked the same question and other people who are very willing to help out by giving links that could give direct assistance.

But what caught my attention are the links below the posts of the responders that lead to different websites aside from what is on the topic.

This, according to Don is what you called the signatures. And most forums allow SEOs to put signatures, given the condition that they have a minimum of 20-50 posts already (depends of the forum). You can find the list of the most popular forums here.

And oh, about my laptop? Well, let's just say that I got the sound of my laptop back in just a matter of minutes after installing the sound card driver that I downloaded in one of the linked websites that I found in the forums.

1. Social Bookmarking

Amazingly, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Propeller and all 'em social bookmarking sites topped the notes in Don's quick SEO 101. These lead people with certain interests to one-of-a-kind websites that are recommended by other people who shares common interests. And all time proven, these generate website traffic instantly and continuously. No rocket science involved.

Back