Link Building

More links, more traffic, more credibility. Link Building is the process of establishing links from other sites to point to your own. This is one of the most critical components of a successful search engine marketing campaign and the benefits are twofold:

1. Search engines, Google in particular, give a lot of weight to sites that have a lot of inbound links. Inbound links are one way links from other sites to your site. The more inbound links from good, quality sites, the higher a given site could rank - all things being equal.
2. Obviously, having links on other sites pointing to your website can result in the benefit of increased traffic to your site.

There are various ways to increase the number of inbound links to your site. Here are a few:

1. General directory listings – There are a number of free and paid directories where you can establish links to your site. Directories like Yahoo, the Open Directory Project, and Business.com are just a couple of examples.
   
   
2. Industry-specific directories and resources – Most industries have industry-specific directories that provide links to relevant websites. Industry specific directories can be valuable because it is thought that Google gives additional weight to sites that have relevant content. For instance, if you are travel agent specializing in cruise vacations; it would benefit you to have links from the major cruise lines. Again, there are some instances where you can acquire links for free and others you will have to pay for. Beware: there are many, many scam artists out there who will charge you to link to your site, and you will get almost no benefit in return. Only deal with credible, established companies that you know your users are likely to use.
   
   
3. Complementary sites – While it would be great if you could get your competitors to link to you, you might have to settle for links from complementary sites. For instance, if you are a real estate agent you might be willing to link to sites that offer mortgage services, title companies, etc. These types of links require some effort to establish, but will pay off huge in terms of search engine results.
   
   
4. Reciprocal linking – This is when you “trade” links with another site and put a link to their site in exchange for a link on their site back to you. While this is still a very popular technique for building links, it is thought that Google now gives less credit to sites that link to one another if the other site also appears to be doing a similar thing with many sites.