Optimize My Search

Building Link Popularity

You did it! You built a website. Now what? The obvious answer, I hope is you need traffic. Unlike a lot of things in life, this time you can’t get enough of a good thing. One of the first steps in your marketing strategy should be building links. Before you begin though, you should understand the difference between reciprocal and non-reciprocal links.

Two websites that simply link to each other is a reciprocal link. Basically both sites send traffic to each other in the basic “scratch each others back” philosophy. Naturally, a non-reciprocal link, or one way link, is just that, a link from a website to another with no return link.

Today’s search engines are extremely intelligent and the position of your site in the search results has a great deal to do with who links to your site. With this in mind a good linking strategy would be to have as many inbound non-reciprocal links as possible with a little reciprocal links advantageously sprinkled in. This will tell the search engines that your site contains valuable information because unless your site was a benefit to another site and their readers, why would they link to it?

An abundance of them could indicate to the search engines that the webmaster solicits links. Especially off target links to what your main topic is about. Remember those intelligent search engines? They will look for key word connections between reciprocal links and determine if both sites are benefiting from each other. Reciprocal links are not evil, just be picky when building them. Spend a moment on the other site and make sure the information there is relevant to your site and something your readers may enjoy. Hopefully you have determined that non-reciprocal links are can get you rated higher in the search engines than reciprocal links can. So then the question becomes: How do I get non-reciprocal links?

The most important step is to create a site full of valuable information about your particular topic. Make it interesting and easy for visitors to navigate; a site that would interest readers from similar sites. If you can get other webmasters to see the benefit your site would bring there readers, getting links becomes real easy. There are several ways to get noticed in the beginning. Email the other webmaster, explain why your site benefits them and provide them with a ready made link. It may surprise you how many times they would be willing to help. Write a review of the other website and email them the link. If it is well written, who wouldn’t want to link to that? Most importantly is be creative and never stop building.

Another good way to get non-reciprocal links is by submitting to web directories. Do a search for web directories and you will find a staggering amount of returns. This is very time consuming and very beneficial as long as you pick directories that are relevant to your site. With this in mind, do not take a short cut and use a program to auto submit to a lot of directories, they seldom work correctly and you do not want to blow an opportunity to get into a good directory because of a program glitch. Same thing for buying a service that submits for you. Be very selective and make sure they are hand submitting your site.

As valuable as SEO is for your site and all its pages, it goes hand in hand with a good link building strategy. By paying close attention to both these marketing strategies, you can be well on your way to climbing up the search engine rankings and being the one people want to link to.