Top Link Building Strategies for new online businesses

It can be hard to believe but all SEO consultants started off as SEO virgins at one point or another in their careers. Anyone who is launching a new website on line or a new business is full of excitement. An element of angst is also present as a business cannot be sure how their website will perform. This initial excitement can soon turn to disappointment when it becomes evident that no traffic is coming to the website. Any traffic that is coming is usually from friends and relatives who have been sent a link through email or another social network such as Facebook or Twitter.

Anyone who is involved in online marketing and SEO usually gets inundated with question upon question about website marketing and internet marketing. Three questions that normally get asked are:

1. What is search engine optimisation?
2. What is link building and how does it work?
3. What is the best marketing strategy to get ranked highly in the search engines?

The answer to all the above questions is simple – natural link building. Building links naturally is the number one factor that is critical to successful SEO.

Having a natural link building strategy has to be built naturally. If your website is only up for ten days and already it has 25,000 links to it then this is evidence that the links are not natural. A natural link building process involves getting slower links coming into your website – links of substance and quality. These types of links are valued by the search engines and will stand your website in good standing. Secondly, having 25,000 links that point to your home page with the same anchor text is not natural. A good tip to remember is to have anchor text that varies and includes long tail combinations of your keywords. As well as building links to point to your homepage it is essential you work in links to other pages on your website. This is known as deep linking. By doing this you will be on your way to a successful natural link building strategy.

Below are some proven methods that help with link building for websites.

Family members and friends

The most natural way of link building is to obtain links from family and friends. Find out which of your family members and friends have websites, blogs and social media profiles. Ask them to place a link back to your website.  For example if you ask 30 people who are wither family of friends to add a link back to your website from their blog or social media account you are instantly getting 30 links back without doing any real hard work.

Your website domain must incorporate a blog

One thing Google and all the other search engines love are blogs. They can’t seem to get enough of them. Search engines like Google absolutely love fresh content, after all content is king in the world of search engine optimisation. Adding a blog to your website is the best way of adding great fresh content on a regular basis.  It is simple to add a blog and in as little as three steps later you could be writing your first blog.
Once your blog is up and running you should post your first blog straight away. To start with one two posts per week is a good start. Ensure each post includes links back to your website, notably the homepage and other important pages, using keyword anchor text at all times as this is the best way to gain internal links. Blogging should also be used to link out to other websites of interest. Blogs are great for mixing things up as you can add images, videos, polls and a whole host of other things. This makes the blog more interesting to read and more natural looking.

Social bookmarking

If you have not heard the term social bookmarking then you need to become familiar with it. Social bookmarking can be very effective to link building – as long as you use the right strategy.  Limit your social bookmarking to only a few sites and bookmark everything you think is relevant – blogs and your website. As well as bookmarking your own content also bookmark things that interest you as this makes your social bookmarking profile seem natural to visitors and the search engines.

Article marketing

Article marketing is very effective for link building. Writing good quality content rich articles and then submitting them to quality article submission sites like Ezine Articles, go Articles and articles base will generate great links back to your website. When writing articles don’t rush and include quality content. Make proper use of the author resource box at the end where you can write some content about your website. Always include keyword rich anchor text back to your website.

Online business directory submission

This can be very valuable in the link building process. There are thousands of online business directories which allow you to submit your business details. However, seek out the good quality business directories that are industry specific and local. Take time to fill in all the details as this information will provide the best links back to your website.

Link building takes a fair bit of time and can sometimes be a messy process. However, to achieve good rankings in the search engines it is absolutely necessary. The above are just some great ways of achieving good quality links for new businesses online.