PubKicks

If you’ve ever built a website and wondered why your new creation is nowhere to be found within the search engines, you have experienced what the lack of a link building strategy will do to your online fortunes.

Like it or not, the Web is a link popularity contest, with many variables. You are competing with other sites to garner top positions based on how many other sites feel yours is a worthwhile stop. That’s the tough news. The good news is that is isn’t rocket science to institute a link building campaign and move your site up in the search results, but it does take some work. (What doesn’t?)

The first step is deciding how you’re going to do this. There are many, many ways to garner incoming links to your site. What you need to do is focus on the long term consequences of the method of building links that you choose. If you take the low road, and choose to use spammy techniques to get thousands of quick backlinks into your site, you should know that those results won’t last, and you’ll end up in the same place you were when you started, only with your site’s reputation damaged.

Better to focus on legitimate, long-lasting strategies that will build your numbers over time, and allow your rankings to steadily grow as well. A good link strategy involves not only incoming links, their Page rank, relevance and keyword rich anchor text and amount, but also outgoing links to sites in our niche and market with authority, and proper internal linking on your own site.

There are more ways than ever before to acquire good, solid incoming links to your sites now. The advent of Web 2.0 sites, social bookmarking and networking sites, and the amazing number or directories available to put a link to your site leaves you wondering just where to start. It doesn’t matter; just dive in!
Of course, consider the reputation, page rank and traffic rank of sites as you place links there. Google values authority sites over others, and you should have a variety of different incoming page rank links from all over the Web. Don’t make the mistake of getting “site-wide” links to your site. Google will discount nearly all of them, and count only one. Also, be very careful about buying text link ads. Google is out to purge those.

The best free links are those in your market or niche, and with anchor text links of keywords that you want your web page to rank for. Be sure to change this up a bit too. Google considers a normal link profile to include your site’s URL, but several different keywords, as well as the occasional “click here”. If your site links anchor text is 5284 links containing the keyword “forex” and no others, you will have raised the red flag on yourself.

Take the time to build (or outsource!) a safe and sane link building campaign. You’ll be rewarded for years to come!