Comprehensive Guide to Link Building
So you’ve got yourself a web site and you’re interested in gaining it some traffic for whatever reason. Many webmasters knows how difficult of a task this can be if the appropriate paths are not taken. Most webmasters out there also know how important traffic is to a web site’s popularity and therefore its success. Traffic doesn’t create itself, which is why as a webmaster, you’ll need to create some yourself. While there are many ways to draw traffic to your web site, through things like unique content and competitive deals, many of these still don’t work efficiently as they don’t magically draw attention to your web site if you don’t have others willing to do that for you. You’ll have to establish relationships with other webmasters in order to redirect some of their traffic your way so that you can benefit from it through the gaining of new regular visitors, sales, or whatever else. That, or you can simply buy your way to some extra traffic as many people choose to do instead of going through the hassle of establishing relationships and creating unique content to make them eligible for submission to various online media sources. We’ll get more into that later on in this guide, but for now I’ll start with explaining the process of building and buying backlinks.
Directing traffic to your own web site is accomplished through others backlinking to content hosted on your own web site. The process of gaining incoming links to your own web site is referred to as “link building”. Link building is crucial for newer web sites to gain traffic and work their way to success, and has been heavily practiced for this reason for many years. Taking part in link building usually involves having to also display outgoing links to other web sites on your own web site in exchange for having your web site linked to on theirs, which is a small price to pay for the extremely valuable traffic that you can gain from link building. Unfortunately, having a relatively new and unpopular web site is not very favourable when exchanging links with other webmasters. Not too many of them are fond of the idea of you gaining a potentially large amount of traffic while they gain next to none, so they will most likely turn down your request to exchange links. This is why, when starting off with link building, it is almost necessary to be willing to invest some money into it. This way, you can buy backlinks to your web site to start you off with some traffic, and then engage in link exchanges once you have a decent amount. Don’t be worried, though – investing some money in the purchasing of backlinks won’t bankrupt you. The most you should be spending is a couple of hundred dollars, and even that is quite excessive. Go beyond that into the thousands, and you’re either getting severely ripped off or you’re buying way more backlinks than you need to be. The best thing to do is to create a budget for yourself to determine the maximum amount of money that you’re willing to spend on backlinks, and then browse through different offerings to find a service that will be able to closely match that budget.
It is important to buy backlinks as a start when deciding to get into link building for a number of reasons. When it comes to doing business online, it is usually truer that you get what you pay for than in the real world. Investing just a little bit of money into buying some backlinks could gain you massive amounts of traffic. However, to ensure that this is the end result, you must stick to a few rules and guidelines when buying backlinks. Firstly, you must make sure that the web site that will be providing the backlinks doesn’t have a substantial amount of other outgoing links to other web sites. If it has more than 50, then your best bet is to stay away, as the chance of your backlink getting clicked diminishes with each additional outgoing link on that web site. It’s usually that you’ll get better deals with web sites that have a lot of outgoing links, but you’d be doing yourself a favor by spending a bit of extra money as doing so will end up paying out in traffic, and that’s the whole point to begin with.
Another thing you’ll want to make sure of is that you choose at least three different anchor text words/phrases per 100 of your backlinks. If you’re unaware, anchor text is the term used to describe clickable text, part of a hyperlink to another web page. You’ll also want a good majority of your anchor text to contain the main keyword relating to your web site, with other relevant keywords mixed in as well. This is important for search engine optimization purposes, another highly necessary component of gaining your web site its traffic. Also, when choosing to buy backlinks from a web site or service that sets you up with web sites that do the backlinking, do your best to choose web sites that are at least somewhat relevant to the content of your own. You’re not going to want to buy backlinks from a web site that sells clothing when your own site is about PC gaming, for example. Another good idea to follow is to include some unique content along with your backlinks if you’re able to. This can include a short article or description of your web site/page, although this is not always necessary, as many web sites do not allow for any content aside from the backlink itself to be displayed. Lastly, make sure that you only purchase backlinks from popular web sites in terms of traffic and search engine ranking. Before committing to your purchase, check out the web site’s Google Page Rank and other related statistics to ensure that your web site is getting the type of exposure that you’re paying good money for. Following these guidelines will help you make the best possible decisions when buying backlinks to draw some traffic to your web site. Since you’ll be trading cash for traffic, rather than traffic for traffic, there is a much higher need for gaining results and that’s why you must be much stricter in your choices until you can engage in link exchanges.
If you don’t have the money to invest into buying backlinks, though, don’t be discouraged. There are plenty other link building methods that won’t cost you anything and could potentially gain you the same amount of success that buying backlinks could. However, going this route will likely cost you a lot more time and effort, and can’t guarantee you the same results that buying backlinks could. Some of these other link building techniques include getting your web site listed in things like e-zines, directories, newsletters, and other related online media content. While these will certainly help at least a bit in bringing some traffic to your web site, they most likely won’t even come close to reciprocal link exchanges and backlink purchases in terms of traffic gained and in the case of being featured in things like e-zines even require extra work out of you in the form of written articles. Obviously, the goal is to minimize the amount of work that you’ll have to do as much as possible, which is why it is best to avoid these link building methods unless absolutely necessary. One way to avoid too much extra work, while link building for free is to submit your web site to directories, which are basically collections of web sites with similar content. Many directories offer free submission, and can gain you quite a bit of traffic as long as you stick to directories that are relevant to your own web site’s content. Relevance is always extremely important, as users tend to follow links that will bring them to similar content rather than content that is completely unrelated to the web site/directory that they’re visiting. Directories are also quite important as they’re often seen as a valuable source for related web sites and draw a lot of traffic themselves. Submitting your web site to a directory is usually free, and doing so can be highly beneficial in many ways. Being listed in an online directory can increase your chances of getting picked up by various search engines, as well as ranking more highly on those search engines. In the end, it just increases the amount of incoming traffic to your web site, and that’s exactly what you want: hassle-free link building. Directories are also very valuable because you usually won’t have to offer anything in return (unless there is a fee involved with submitting to one).
No matter which road you decide to take, though, just know how important and potentially beneficial link building can be. Being successful in practicing link building will mean gaining legitimate, meaningful traffic from relevant sources and in turn an increase in sales (if you are selling anything on your web site, in which case link building becomes the most helpful). Link building will also boost your web site’s general visibility and popularity, as long as high quality traffic continues to come In on a regular basis. Lastly, link building does wonders for your web site on the many popular search engines such as Google, by eventually boosting your Page Rank and overall general search results ranking for certain keywords, phrases, etc.
If you want your web site to see some success on the Internet, you’ll have to earn that success. The amount of traffic that a successful web site needs doesn’t come free, or even cheap. A lot of work and/or money goes into transforming a new web site into one that has thousands (or even millions) of visitors every day. Imagine the impact that would have on your own web site and use that as motivation to start link building in the most efficient way possible so that having that kind of traffic in the future becomes a real possibility. Of course, link building alone isn’t going to get you there – you’ll need some unique content or products/services that will attract even more visitors once the traffic starts flowing from directories, partnered web sites, or whoever you’re conducting your link building business with. One thing is for sure though: link building is the biggest stepping stone for taking your web site to the level of potential greatness, and is as relevant today as it has been for many years. Hopefully this guide has helped you understand the extreme importance of link building and driving traffic to your web site. Continue to build links in the various ways outlined here and you’ll get your web site to the status it deserves to be at in no time.
