5 Link Building Basics for Beginners

We all (well most of you here), know that building the right sort of links to your website will help your rankings in Google and the other search engines which in turn will bring more traffic to your site. Despite this some beginners seem to miss some of the basic link building tricks so here are 5 tips to get the newbies started!

1: See which other sites rank well for you keywords. This seems obvious but taking a methodological approach will make sure you get the best results. Start by downloading the top 100 results for your main keywords from Google and add them to a spreadsheet. Work through the spreadsheet and delete the ones that you feel aren’t worth contacting (for example competitors). Any site that ranks in the top 10 pages for your keywords will be a great link to get, don’t spam these people, write an individual email to each one giving them a compelling reason to link to your site (it doesn’t have to be a link to your home page, perhaps you have a great article or could offer to write one for their site). Record contact details and responses in your spreadsheet as it is easy to forget who you have and haven’t contacted after sending lots of these emails (you don’t just have to contact them by email, try other ways such as Twitter too). When you have finished with these look further down the Google results or try results from different search engines or search results for different but related keywords.

2. Following on from point one. Think about what compelling reasons you can give to people to link to your site? If you can’t think of one then it may be time to go back to the drawing board and come up with some interesting content, features, images or tools that people will want to link to.

3. Great content alone is not enough. If you’ve read that content is king and that if you keep churning out quality content then visitors will come then you’re probably mistaken. Great content is very, very important but it needs a push to get it in front of the right people, especially for new sites that don’t have big followings. If you have great, linkable content use it to ask people for links explaining how it would benefit their visitors’. Share your content via Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon and other social networking platforms.

4. Join in the discussion on relevant sites, forums and blogs. Not only can you often leave a link back to your site when you leave a comment but you will meet other bloggers and website owners who can share ideas and there may even be opportunities to write for their sites and link back to your own.

5. Think about the traffic you will get from a link. This is a great way to assess the value of the links. If the link is relevant and on a relevant site with good traffic then it probably will send you traffic and probably will help your rankings. Google likes these types of links as they are genuinely helpful to real people.