Can't Buy Love Or Links

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." ~ Charles Darwin, English naturalist, (1809–1882)

Let's talk link building.

To survive in the online business world, you must play the link building game. This is also called acquiring "back links" or "link popularity." Whatever you call it, it can literally make or break your site with the search engines.

What am I talking about?

All search engines value links as a measure of how influential and important a web site is online. Sites with many important, related sites linking to them are seen in the eyes of the engines to be industry resources, and therefore deserving of the highest ranking.

Bottom line... the more relevant sites that link to you the higher in the rankings your pages will be indexed and the greater amount of names or sales will you acquire.

However, did I mention this is one of the most difficult areas of SEO?

Every smart marketer wants numerous sites linking to them but they don't want to link back. Plus the engines don't want "artificially created" or paid for links going to your site. That type of manipulation is bad for the engines algorythm, and bad for their search results.

As such, the days of buying thousands of links and jumping to the top of the rankings are over. This so-called "link farming" is no longer profitable. Google will only recognize as a true "back link" a relavent link from a like minded site. Google will ingnore what it deems to be fake or purchased links.

Oh, and if Google finds that you are trying one of the old link farming strategies... they can de-list you. That's right... boot you right out of the engine. AND right out of business.

So to be clear what do the engines want?

Real natural and organic links going to your site. Links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site. So where to start?

How about just asking those like minded site to link to you?

Sounds simple, no?

Seriously, email or contact relevent sites and ask them to link to your site. Sell them on the benefits of linking to you... that they will give their readers access to your extremely valuabkle content.

But before contacting them look over their site, study it, make sure it's a good fit, and suggest where your link might be appropriate. And where do you find these like-minded sites?

Google.

Go to the major search engines for your research, and search for your target keywords. Look at the pages that appear in the top results. You want these links..
contact them.

Don't be disappointed if you get rejected. The majority of the time you will be turned down, especially sites that are extremely competitive with you.

However, don't give up... there will be non-competitive sites that will link to you -- especially if you offer them content, products, revenue shares, etc.

So what are you waiting for?

AP

PS - more link building ideas to come...