Website Promotion and Link Building

Having many website backlinks means there are many websites which link to yours. It is an important factor if you want to come up high in search engine result pages. This article will outline some of the steps a link building campaign should contain.

Back in the mid to late nineties, exchanging links was the corner stone navigating the internet. Internet surfers did not have access to high quality search engines, and the best way for most webmasters and internet surfers to find each other were through links.

Websites linked themselves to other websites, mainly those covering the same topic and theme, but sometimes also interesting sites and portals. Some websites were organized in various banner exchange and webring networks, but most focused on reciprocal link exchanges. Usually this was done by creating pages with links followed by seeking out websites to make text, button and banner link exchanges with.

However, as Google and other search engines popularized ranking websites partly based on number of incoming links, people began to more agressively seeking link exchanges and using link farms. Search engines in response to this implemented various algorithms to counter and penalize such behavior when overdone.

Today, you have to be careful with reciprocal links. Limit the number and try only to exchange links with websites that cover the same or related topics as your own. More importantly, make sure to avoid link farms and bad neighborhood websites, i.e. avoid linking to sites with low quality content.

It is important not having too many links to low quality websites. However, it is generally always good to get links pointing to your website, even if from small quality websites. Some of the easier ways, but also somewhat time consuming, are:

• Submit your website to directories such as dmoz and alike.
• Write articles and submit them to various article syndication websites. Make sure the article contains an about box with backlink to your website,
• Issue press releases, e.g. through PRWeb and similar services, to magazine and website editors when you release new products.
• Make yourself a regular poster at relevant internet forums and message boards. These often allow signatures in posts written by you.

If you have a talent for writing interesting articles, you may be able to link bait your way to huge amounts of visitors. One growing trend on the internet is for people to share and discuss news, thoughts, links etc. through social network sites.

An easy way to write and publish articles is to have a blog. There exist many excellent and free blogging platforms, e.g. WordPress. These make it easy to write nice looking articles and have them syndicated to popular RSS feed sites.

However, for even the best articles and news to succeed as link bait, you have to:

• Time your post, e.g. offer a controversial point of view on something discussed in popular blogs.
• Attract extra attention to it from people, e.g. through forums and your regular blog readers.
• Submit to various social networks and hope it will get voted to the top.