Increasing Your Website Visibility

What is Link Building? It's the process of obtaining quality in-bound links for a website. The more links a website receives, the greater "authority" search engines give it on a particular subject.
There are many benefits to Link Building, some of these include:

• Increased traffic to your website.


• Assists you in getting your site indexed in major search engines quickly.


• Gives your website a higher PageRank.

With the good, comes the bad. You really need to be careful who you are linking to and who links to you. Websites that are in "bad neighborhoods" can hurt your site. Websites that promote link farming are a big no-no. In addition, buying links is frowned upon as well.
There are many different link types involved in the Link Building process. These link types include:

• Authority Links - Authority Links are the best and sometimes the most difficult to obtain. These links come from websites with similar content to your website and have a high PageRank (PR2 - PR10).


• Reciprocal Links (a.k.a. Two-Way Linking) - These links are an exchange from one website to another. Tip: If you already have a link set-up on your site, people seem to be more receptive to linking back.


• Directory Links - The internet has millions of directories you can submit your website information to however, there are a couple directories like dmoz.org, dir.yahoo.com that are very beneficial to included in. You can also submit your information to internet yellow page directories however, I've found even for a free listing they still want to talk to you.


• One-Way Links - One-Way Links are natural links to a website without any benefit of the originating website. These links are heavily weighted by search engines.


• Article Links - Writing articles and submiting them to websites that are in a similar industry or websites like Ezine Articles, is a good way to get links. The better the website you are submitting to the higher standard your article will be held to.


• Press Release Links - Press Releases can be distributed to many websites. Some of the sites do charge a fee but there are still plenty of free PR websites. Try www.pr.com. Typically, you won't see a huge amount of links from Press Releases but they are out there.


• Blog/RSS Links - Pretty simple. If you write blog posts about topics people are interested in and provide information that may not be readily available or maybe offering a different point of view will get people to link to you.


• Comment Links - Comment Links are getting more and more difficult to find due to that nasty "no-follow" tag. These links can be received by making comments on blogs. Don't be surprised if you don't get a link.


• Social Media Links - These are typically all no-follow links but they can lead to beneficial links if someone that visits your website through a Social Media Link finds your website interesting enough to link to.

So where do you find these links? Good question! There are plenty of resources out there that can help you in tracking down some valuable links and there is some hard work involved as well. Here is a list of ways to get links:

• Ask for them - If you find a website that relates to yours, do a check to see who the webmaster is and contact them accordingly. Ask friends and family that have websites as well. Even if its not related content, every little bit helps. Ask your followers on Twitter or Facebook.


• Submit them to directories.


• Be "link-worthy" - Good content will help you receive links.


• Reciprocity - Exchange links with other webmasters. If you are a small business, maybe you know some other small business owners in your area willing to do an exchange.

There are several ways to find websites willing to link to yours. You can use a Link Building software like Link Nabber , visit Alexa and do a search on your competitors or businesses in the same industry and see who is linking to them or you can do a search in your favorite search engine for your keywords and find similar sites.