SEO and Link Building 101
It’s no secret that reaching more customers is a goal of nearly all business owners. As I discussed in a previous post…your potential and current customers are online and searching. There are roughly 5,500 searches that occur every second.
That’s right….every second!
The harsh reality is….roughly 90% of all of those searches will not venture beyond the first page of the search engine results.
So how do you get higher on the search engine rankings, so that you’re the one your potential customers find?
This is done through a process called Search Engine Optimization.
There are two main aspects of Search Engine Optimization…On page SEO and off Page SEO. On page SEO includes altering elements on your website that you can control. Some of these include:
- Code structure
- Title tags
- Url structure
- Content
- Header tags
- etc
The other aspect of SEO is off page optimization, or link building.
One thing to remember is that Google and other search engines care more about what others say about you then what you say about yourself. If I was to stand up in a crowded restaurant and yell out…”I am the best marketer ever” I may intrigue some people, but if everyone in the restaurant stood up and pointed at me and said “David is the best marketer out there” I would get better results.
In the search engine world this happens as well. Links are the currency of the web. The goal is to receive as many links, especially relevant ones as possible. This is done through a process called link building.
Some aspects of link building include…
Article submissions (Write quality content around topics related to your industry and then submit to these sites with your link included in the article or resource box)
Top article directory sites
- EzineArticles.com
- GoArticles.com
- ArticleDashboard.com
- SearchWarp.com
- ArticlesBase.com
- iSnare.com
- SelfGrowth.com
- Buzzle.com
- ArticleCity.com
- IdeaMarketers.com
Press Release Submissions: Anytime that you have a new hire, noteworthy client, publish a new whitepaper, are going to attend conference, have a speaking engagement, launch a new product or service, etc…It’s wise to submit online press releases. Here is a very strong list of 50+, many of which are free:
http://www.avangate.com/articles/press-release-distribution_69.htm
Directory submissions (There are thousands of website directories online that will provide a link to your website. You can see a large list here: http://www.addurl.nu/)
Blog Commenting (Conduct a search for your topic at technorati.com and leave a thoughtful comment with a link back to your website on a blog post that someone has published)
Social bookmarking– Bookmark your website on sites like Digg.com, stumbleupon.com and Delicious.com these sites are highly trafficked and provide great awareness.
Guest blogging– Reach out to popular bloggers within your industry and submit a well written blog post with your link included in the post.
Link Requests– If you have friends in your industry, or others with websites in general email them and ask them to link to your website with a targeted keyword as the anchor text or hyperlink.
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Working to improve your search engine visibility is a great way to increase your businesses visibility. Keep in mind that getting a potential customer to your website is only half the battle. Once they are there you need them to do what you want them to do…typically contact you, register, or buy something (depending on your business). Having a well designed site and monitoring your analytics is very important to accomplish this.
Signing off for now…There are many more tips, strategies and resources out there to help improve your search engine visibility. Hopefully this post gave you some basics.
If you have any additional questions feel free to reach out to me. Brand Advance, my firm, would be more than happy to give your business a free consultation around this topic. Simply fill out our contact form on the Brand Advance site and we’ll get back to you.
What other tips do you feel should be included in basic SEO & Link Building 101?
What questions do you have?
Good bravo! We have new launched website, we need google friendly SEO for that. The suggested tip will be very beneficial for me……
Hi link building is very important parts of SEO all is very necessary to promote any blog or site thanks for great sharing.
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Reach out to popular bloggers within your industry and submit a well written blog post with your link included in the post.
I have Godaddy’s Website Tonight and it’s horrible, what options are better?
I can’t say which is ‘best’, but I can say that none of it is any good. Links from directories like at at worthless – they don’t get visitors so you don’t get direct traffic from them, and search engines don’t like link farms, so you don’t get boosted up the search ranks with them.
Amazing post thanks for shearing..
I dont know what else I can do, and I don’t know how long it will take to start ranking. I have pretty much no budget for SEO, but I am also using AdWords.
I have two shopping related websites.. and i want to do SEO and Link building for both websites and I want 300 – 300 links per site! How much i have to spend?
When you do the Google search, put ” ” around what you are looking for to narrow the search, and in addition to the usual web search, you can now also click on “groups” at the top for more/additional info.
Using blatant Anchor Text instead of a handle or name in the Name field of blog comments can have the same result, so don’t do it!
hi,
I think linkbuilding is a base of seo.This is really a part of seo that improve site traffic.
I dont know what else I can do, and I don’t know how long it will take to start ranking. I have pretty much no budget for SEO, but I am also using AdWords.
yes two factor of seo but i think a good on page and continuing off pgae for your u increase your traffic and ranking on search engines.
On page and off page SEO are on parallel merit.rather on page or off page can’t do anything alone.EzineArticles.com is really a good site for article submission.These all material related to SEO will surly helps us.Thanks for sharing with us the informative knowledge.
I am also a SEO. on page doing only one time for a website but off page doing daily for a website.
I’ve seen a number of introduction/101 SEO blog posts, but this one is clear and concise. Thanks
Amazing post thanks for shearing david 🙂 Linkbuilding is a base of seo…
How can i keep track of the links i built? can i somehow know each and every link i built on the internet?
Hi, this is interesting article, that is the thing I’m looking for over the net. Finally I found it. I learned a lot, this useful article and I think other readers might find it useful as well.
The Blogging world is a community, so visiting other sites and connecting is one of the greatest way to become a member. Support others, and you will get help back.
All the article directories are good. I checked and submit mine in these.
I’m working on all the Seo linking plans that mentioned above..
This is a great introduction to SEO and link building. I like how you paired the two topics together as they definitely go hand in hand. I’m hoping you’ll go more in depth about each of these link building strategies. There are a lot of ins and outs to learn to truly master any link building strategy. Keep in mind that a balanced link profile is much better than a site who gets all their links from one strategy.
I did Linkbuilding before and sometimes Links will not work or we call it spammed.. But now I think there’s new app that doing linkbuilding is much easier…
Link building is key for SEO. Directory links helps get more and more link. article directory links helps to content links which are very good in google eyes and rate them very high.
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